Wooden Rocking Horse Makeover

Wooden Rocking Horse Makeover

Posted by DecoArt on Aug 28th 2016

I am a yard sale and thrift store junkie!  Seriously I go into withdrawals if I haven’t gone in a while. I love to find furniture, home decor, and most recently baby items and refinish them.  We just recently added a beautiful baby girl to our family and I had several things on my list to find for her – one of which was a rocking horse!

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Instructions:

I walked into Goodwill earlier this summer and found this wood beauty for under $7.

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DecoArt just came out with some new Chalky Finish colors that I just love!  This new gray color, called Artifact, is the perfect gray and was just what I wanted for this project.

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I lightly sanded the rocking horse to smooth out any rough edges and then it was time to paint.  It was done in no time and I completely forgot to take picture during the process! Seriously, this took less than 30 minutes.  I decided to accent the horse with a pink seat and handles using Innocence Chalky Finish paint.  After the paint was dry, I lightly sanded the edges to distress it a bit.

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Then, it was time to wax.  It is completely up to you on what kind of finish you want. You can choose to not wax at all, do just clear creme wax, do dark creme wax, or do a mixture of the two.  I find that dark wax by itself is too dark for me so I like to mix it with a good bit of creme wax.  I will dab my brush or rag in the dark wax and then dab most of it off on a plate and then mix it into a good amount of creme wax.  Just so I have a hint of the dark wax on my brush and on my piece.

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Here’s the difference the wax makes.  Even just the clear wax will make the distressed exposed wood areas darker and richer and since I was using a bit of dark wax, it darkened the gray paint a good bit.

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And here’s the finished horse!  I just love it and I know that when our baby girl gets big enough she will too.  And it goes perfectly in her nursery which is gray and white with just a touch of pink!

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