Sassy Interiors: So I Did It. I Painted My Sofa

Our Sassy Interiors Contributor Puts the Most Talked About Paint Technique into Practice…On Her Sofa

Part 2: (check out part 1 here)

Me and my big mouth. After recently doing an Annie Sloan paint workshop, I made the somewhat rash statement that I was going to paint my leather sofa. If I thought people would smile indulgently and put it down to artistic licence, I was wrong. Near daily enquiries followed about whether the deed had been done yet. Yikes, I thought, I’m actually going to have to paint my sofa.

Thankfully the sofa in question was old and battered and was definitely due some kind of intervention. I thought it needed a loose cover. Mr Y thought it needed a bin. He definitely did not think it needed painting. Undeterred, off I went to buy the paints. It’s 50 Shades of Grey in my house (colour scheme wise!) so I spent some time with the tester pots mixing the exact grey I wanted. I bought Louis Blue, Graphite and Pure then headed home and set to work.

I can’t really describe the frenzy of excitement that Mummy so dramatically flouting the ‘we only paint on paper’ rule caused among my 3 children. They were desperate to help which obviously slowed me down considerably.

My top tip here would be that the fewer ‘helpers’ under the age of 7 that you can arrange, the better.

Thankfully they quickly got bored and my son decided to get photographic evidence of Mummy losing her mind instead.

I should say at this point that while the paint is brilliant, I am not. My biggest mistake was using 2 plastic Minnie Mouse party cups as measuring implements. Apparently making a mental note of roughly how far up Minnie’s ear each colour needs to go, does not result in an exact match every time you mix more paint. This sofa really was being painted in 50 shades of grey.

I’m not going to lie, it looked horrendous.

I decide on the only course of action I could think off which might improve the situation; a large glass of wine.

The wine didn’t help my sofa but it did help me get a good night’s sleep so I sprang out of bed the following morning sure that waxing it was going to fix everything. And you know what? It kind of did. If the paint is brilliant, the wax is magic. I painted on the clear wax a section at a time with the excellent Annie Sloan wax brush then buffed it in a circular motion with an old t-shirt. Suddenly the sofa became all shiny again. The wax evened out the patchy paint work and it started to look like a slightly distressed, quite cool, grey leather sofa!

The sofa lives in our playroom so has my munchkins jumping all over and, at the moment, it’s holding up well. I forgot to mention earlier that Mr Y sat on it before it was waxed which both incurred my wrath and caused several cracks in the paint. The wax did a great job of sealing them though and they kind of add to the distressed look so I’ll probably forgive him at some point. Especially if he buys me a new sofa…