Easy Tip to Give New Wood an Aged Look

A few months ago I blogged about my daughter’s nursery, which includes a rustic picket fence on the wall above her crib. I actually had several questions on social media asking where I found the “vintage picket fence”. Well my friends, you might be surprised to know that I simply bought it at Home Depot. Yep, it definitely wasn’t a vintage find of any kind. It was just a little painting trick that gave the fence that aged, rustic look. Today I’m spilling the beans and sharing exactly how I did it. This easy tip to give new wood an aged look will work on just about anything. It’s so simple and doesn’t involve any fancy products or hours of waiting!

First step: find something to paint. We got our fence at Home Depot, but this technique will work on any new wood.

OK, here’s the big secret to getting an aged, rustic look on new wood: spray paint. I simply spray painted the fence black. Nothing fancy, just a basic black spray paint. Brown would also work really well. The idea here is to cover up the lighter color of the natural wood with a dark color so that when it’s time to distress it, you have that dark peeking through–which is what gives it an aged look. If you painted directly over the natural wood, any distressing wouldn’t really show up because of the wood’s light color underneath. So painting it black first gives us the aged look we’re going for.

Then I painted the whole thing white. Yep, just paint directly over the spray paint, it goes on just fine.

After the paint has dried it’s time to roughen it up! I used a sanding block to sand down the edges, sides, front–all of it. The more distressing you do, the more you’ll see that dark spray paint underneath and the older it will look. You could also use a paint scraper to get even more of a distressed look.

Ta-da!

And here it is in Allie’s nursery.

We found studs in the wall and screwed it into place so it would be nice and secure.

I think this is the easiest and fastest way to fake that aged look on new wood. Sure there are fancy products out there and long, time consuming tutorials that will get you a similar look. But I’m all about easy around here, so this wins out for me. And like I said, the more distressing you do over the black spray paint the more aged it will look. Easy peasy!

Well I hope you enjoyed this quick tip today! Let me know if you have any questions, I’d love to help. And thanks a ton for stopping by, I hope you all have a fabulous week. Go do awesome things!