Annie Sloan Mirror Makeover .... Before and After

A couple of years ago I bought a beautiful, if somewhat shabby, over mantle mirror from eBay for about £30. Some of you may have noticed that I get quite a lot of stuff from eBay .... it's rather  a bad habit of mine but there are so many bargains and I find them hard to resist ....... a bit like car boot sales :-)  Anyway, the mirror has been sitting in my spare bedroom ever since just waiting to be transformed. I have been itching to get started for ages and since I bought the Annie Sloan Chalk Paint, it's just been a case of finding the time to transform it. That time finally came last Thursday.

I gathered my lovely collection of Annie Sloan paints together to try and decided if I was brave enough to paint the mirror any colour other than Old White ..... sadly, I wasn't, I chickened out again and so out came the Old White. I do feel slightly annoyed with myself. I have seen many beautiful items on other blogs where clever people have used the Annie Sloan products to great effect but I'm still not quite brave enough to give it a go on something really big and something that is eventually going to be in a very conspicuous position over my fireplace in the middle of my living room. Cowardly I know, but there you go. 

Before 

I know I said in a previous post that the paint is quite expensive and at £17.25 for a 1ltr can, it's much more expensive than the paint I would normally buy but, I must say, I am very impressed at how far the paint goes. I did two layers of paint on the mirror and as you can see, it's quite a big mirror and I barely even made a dent in the can of paint. I did find that I had to mix in some water though because the paint was very thick and quite hard to use, but once the water was added, the paint went on beautifully. It dries really quickly too and I managed to get the whole thing painted twice in about 4 hours. I was going to wax the mirror with some of the clear wax but I think the mirror is quite old and it's a bit rickety and I had to put parcel tape around the edge of each of the mirrors on the back because I was slightly worried that they would fall out and I didn't want to go near it with a hammer and nails, so I just buffed the mirror with a cloth to get rid of some of the chalkiness and hung it over the fire. 

After

It's now just waiting to be decorated with some mini-bunting, some cute little knick-knacks (Yipee, more rummaging in junk shops) and it will be finished. Actually, with hind-sight, I should maybe have painted the panels at the bottom a different colour, maybe a pale grey, or even a really pale pink but that will have to wait until I can get the thing off the wall again! It was quite a job to get it up there in the first place and took two of us several attempts to get it hung and straight so, unless I can figure out a way to paint it while it's still on the wall, it might just have to stay Old White forever. 

Annie Sloan Chalk Paint ..... I'm a convert .... Maybe.

I have been blogging on and off for about 18 months or so, and seriously for about the last 8 months and during that time I have read countless blogs, many of which give me loads of inspiration and ideas. Lately, I have noticed the buzz words on a fair few of these blogs is Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. A couple of blogs in particular, Shingle Cottage and One Girl in Pink have some wonderful examples of what the paint can do. Always up for a challenge, and curious to see if the hype is justified, I managed to track down a stockist in Launceston, Cornwall about 20 miles from where I live and yesterday, I hopped in the car and zoomed off to buy some Annie Sloan. I haven't been to Launceston before, despite living in Cornwall for the last 13 years. It's quite a cute little town and has an amazing castle on a hill which dates back to the Norman Conquest and it also has some very cute shops. The lovely shop 'Country Chic' which stocks the Annie Sloan paint is full of lovely shabby chic things which I would love to put in my house.

The first thing I found out about the paint is that it's not cheap. It's £6.25 for a tester pot of 100mls and it's £17.25 for a 1 litre tin. However, having read a fabulous blog post on the One Girl in Pink blog called 'Ten Projects ... One Can of Chalk Paint' I was almost reassured that a little goes a long way. 

Unfortunately, after driving all the way to Launceston, it turned out that they were waiting for a delivery of paint and I had to go back this morning to get the 1 litre cans of Old White that I wanted. I did manage to get some tester pots though, in a variety of gorgeous colours and also a couple of tester pots of Old White. I was very excited. As soon as I got home I grabbed a little table that I had earmarked as my first project and began happily slapping on the paint. I assumed this was the way to do it as this is the way Annie herself does it in the tutorials on the Annie Sloan website. She seems to just slap in on with gay abandon .... absolutely my kind of decorating :-)

The second thing I found is that it is lovely to use. It can be used on virtually anything with hardly any preparation at all. It can be used outside on garden furniture, on metal and on wooden floors as well as on furniture, in fact it can be used on virtually everything and as an added bonus, it doesn't have that horrible paint smell. In fact it actually smells quite nice, sort of like a cross between chalk and clay. 

Two coats of paint later and I haven't even finished one tester pot of Old White paint. I was very impressed. Two coats of clear wax and a light sanding later and voila ...... one gorgeously transformed table.

From this .....                                                                To This ..... in about 3 hours.

I wasn't brave enough to try the dark wax, which basically looks like brown boot polish. Although you can apparently lighten it and darken it by using the clear wax to adjust the colour, I think I will leave that for my next project, some cute little shelves that I had already painted with undercoat many months ago and never got round to finishing and which now has a top coat of fabulous duck egg paint. Watch this space .......