Meatsafe

After I had see this image of a painted meatsafe I knew that my sad old brown meatsafe's days were numbered and with last weekend promising warm sunny weather it was too good an opportunity to miss. I bought the meatsafe ages ago from eBay after I realised that we needed some more storage space in our kitchen.

I had already removed the oval Bakelite handle that it came with and replaced it with an old French cupboard catch - another of my finds from eBay! It's exactly the same as the one I bought for our TV cabinet.

I gave it a good clean, then sanded it to take the sheen of the wood stain. Cleaned it again and began painting. I had originally wanted to paint it in "Pointing" by Farrow and Ball but it was proving to be a bit too light so I switched to "Stock" by Little Greene after the first coat.
Then I gave it a coat of clear wax and took the sand paper to it. I was quite subtle with my distressing - I'm not that keen on furniture where you can easily see that someone has really gone to town with the sand paper. Although looking at my photo I think it could do with a little bit more distressing!

It is almost finished and back in the kitchen, but is still a bit too "bright white" looking for me so I've ordered some of Annie Sloan's Dark Wax. I'm a bit afraid to use it though - it is very dark! If anyone has recently had any dalliances with dark wax let me know how you found it!