UPDATE: We finally reupholstered the piano bench! Shoutout to my main man and his staple gun, and Hobby Lobby’s clearance fabric section.
ORIGINAL POST: My boyfriend Austin loves surprises. Loves them. Not necessarily getting them, but giving them. Rewind to about a year and a half ago, when he bought a house in midtown Tulsa, and we needed stuff to fill it with. Both he and I had played piano in our childhoods, and he knew we both missed practicing. One day, he surprised me with a piano he’d gotten for free from a friend of a coworker.
Isn’t it beautiful? The Instagram filter helps. I love how beat-the-hell-up this piano looked. There were nicks and scratches all over it, and the legs are loose. Inside the piano bench, someone left their autobiography, typed out in double-spaced 14-point font. No joke. It’s still there and on my reading list.
While I loved the texture, the color of the piano blended in with our hardwood floors — in a really bad yellow-gold kind of way. During one of Austin’s work trips, I painted this bad boy. News flash: it’s just as easy as everyone says.
OK honestly though, we need to talk about how you people act like there is only one god and that god is named Annie Sloan Chalk Paint. Well, shut that commandment down real quick because first of all, that stuff is impossible to find. According to the Annie Sloan website, the closest store to me that sells it is in Claremore, a town 45 minutes away from Tulsa. Secondly, it costs a bunch of bitcoins and your first-born for one can.
Surprise: other chalk paints exist and they work just fine. I bought a can of Rustoleum Chalked Paint in Charcoal at Home Depot for less than $40. I used about 2/3 of it.
Some blogs I read said you didn’t even need to sand your piano before painting it. However, I assume those bloggers did not own a piano from the 1720s that has been to hell and back. There were so many chips and nicks on our piano that I was getting splinters just looking at the thing. I definitely felt like I needed to sand every surface (except the back). A few sheets of fine-grain sandpaper worked fine. This part took me and my little arms about an hour.
After sanding, I wiped it down with a wet cloth and let it dry for about 10-15 minutes. THEN — I started painting. I didn’t couldn’t move the piano very much, just pulled it out a few inches from the wall, enough room for me to paint the sides.
I spent about two hours painting the piano on the first night, then let it dry overnight. On the second night, I spent another two hours painting the more intricate parts, like the inside of the fall board (the part that covers the keys and then folds back into the piano when you want to play/see the keys) and the music rack, which has a lot of decorative cut-outs and required some time to go over with a smaller brush. I also went over most of the surfaces with a second coat on the second night. All told, it took about five hours (not counting dry time) to complete.
And behold, it no longer blends in with our floors! [Plz ignore the handheld vacuum thx.]
Next project: reupholstering that fugly bench. #vomitburgundy
anniemaychang 