Distressing your Home

Not everyone can have a home filled with magnificent heirloom and antique pieces. You may have found yourself envying someone who has these kinds of pieces, with all their charm and character that comes with being handed down from one generation to the next.

While you may not have someone whose going to leave you an heirloom in the near future, there are still ways to fill your home with the rustic look by purchasing distressed furniture.

Distressed furniture is new furniture that is made to look old through a number of processes. A shelving unit that is crisp and new – put into the hands of a person who is experienced with distressing – can look as if it had been used for years at an old southern plantation.

Even if you have specific color schemes in mind, you’ll find pieces to match. The popularity of distressed furniture offers you virtually unlimited choices, not only styles but color combinations.

If you want to stick to natural wood colors, you‘ll be able to find pieces that have been properly aged; given dents, dings, and even holes that may look as if a worm had made its way through the layers of the wood.

For a softer tone in your rustic furnishings, try a white distressed furniture finish. Pieces of teak furniture that have this effect look much as if they have been whitewashed in the past, with some small amounts of the grain of the under wood showing, and the paint looking as if it has cracked and begun to chip after generations of use.

In a home where brighter country colors are being utilized, distressed painted furniture may be the best choice. These pieces of furniture may be painted in bright red, blue and other country colors, but then the finish is nicked, scratched, cracked, dented and otherwise worn in areas where the piece would have seen regular usage. For instance, a distressed desk would see more wear around the edge of the desktop, on the writing surface, and near the handle pulls on the drawers.

Properly distressing a piece of furniture is an art form. But having a piece of properly distressed furniture in your home can let you have that antique look you’ve always dreamed of.