How to Make New Wood Look Old

Earlier this week I shared a 15 minute DIY towel hook.   Now I can let you in on my little secret....about 14 minutes of that project was spent getting the new wood to actually look old and distressed. 

The scrap wood I used to hang the hooks on wasn't actually 'new' wood from the lumber yard.  It was wood I had in the garage, but it looked relatively new aside from a few splotches of paint.   The surface was smooth, there were no splinters or dings or nail holes.  I didn't want the wood to look this new though, I wanted it to look old, worn, distressed, loved...

To get it looking like that actually took some work.  I started by going at it with a hammer.   I just banged all over the wood with the hammer.  This made circles (from the head of the hammer) in the wood in places which were much more obvious than I would have liked. I wanted this to look like it had naturally been aged.  (Once I painted the wood those hammer head marks weren't nearly as obvious.)  I used the hammer all over the wood  - in the middle, the edges and the corners.

 

Then I drove some nails into the wood - always removing each nail after making the hole.  I used various size nails.

I also used a hammer to drive a screw driver into the wood near the edge. I wanted the wood to split and this is exactly what happened with the screw driver.  I did this in several places to get several cracks.

Once I had the piece of wood looking like I wanted it, I sanded it down to smooth out some of the marks.

Then I painted it with white chalk paint.  When that was dry, I sanded it down again along the edges and corners to give it a nice distressed look.

And here's what the finished towel hook looks like.

Click here to be taken to the tutorial on making the towel hook.

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