How to Whitewash a Pallet Coffee Table DIY

Here is my favorite home improvement tutorial to date, first featured on Love Stitched.

So…over the holidays Mr. Med School made me a pallet coffee table. Before we had a dark brown triangular coffee table (the kind meant for sectionals) and it was just kind of dark and sad. It had a matching side table, which was dark and clunky and just brought down the room a little for me. So I asked hubby to make me a pallet coffee table and I thrifted the side table and painted it red.

The room looks so much lighter and brighter now! I can’t really tell you exactly how to build the coffee table (maybe I should get hubby to post a tute for that?) but what I am going to show you is how to whitewash a pallet without losing all of those awesome raw wood details.

First of all, water down your paint. I used semigloss white paint that I had left over from the trim. I watered it down to 2 parts water 1 part paint. I was worried that it would look too glossy because it was semigloss but it didn’t at all. Now, if you use straight paint, the above is what will happen to your wood. It will be white. Which is fine, but the character of the wood kind of gets lost.

It’s really easy to do this technique! This is all you do:

First, sand the pallet with a medium grit sand paper. You don’t want to make it smooth, you just want to remove the big splinters.

Then brush on your watered down paint.

Wipe it off with a dry cloth, until it’s pretty dry.

Then dip your brush in the paint again and put the brush in another cloth so it can soak up some of the paint. Now that your brush is almost dry you’re going to go back over the area that you just did. This lets the paint highlight the details.

This may be hard for the perfectionists out there, but hear me out: DO NOT do a second coat. DO NOT fix anything. Once you’re done just walk away. Because this isn’t supposed to look pristine, it’s not supposed to look perfect. It’s supposed to look weathered, and that’s exactly what it will look like if you follow my instructions.

I love my new table, and because we used found pallets and paint we had on hand, it was FREE. And I love free.