Big Girl Bed Frame: How I Hand Painted a Floral Motif

In part one of this little series, I showed you a bit of how I removed the chalk paint. In this post, I’ll share more of how we transformed it from antique to big girl bed frame. It took a lot of elbow grease, a little bit of stain, some wall paint, and a sealant. Let’s get into it shall we?

Cleaning Up:

I got into this a bit more in my last post, but the bed frame was covered in chalk paint. When I went to clean the bed, it started to come off. My original plan was to use the white chalk paint as a base for a floral motif. When we realized it wasn’t sealed, the option to refinish the big girl bed frame opened up and I got excited. The rest of my family wasn’t so thrilled about the amount of work ahead of me. But if you’re going to do something, do it the way you want right? Why settle? Click to learn more about how I took the chalk paint off of the bed frame.

Touch Up:

At some points I had literally hosed the bed off in between scrubbing, so my next step was letting it fully dry out. This wasn’t a problem because it was July heat in every essence of the phrasing. We touched it up with some hand sanding and made sure it was free of any dust. This was the first time I really got stuck. We had one stain that I really liked, and one that would have better matched the dresser that is already in the bedroom. Ultimately I chose the matching stain. This was my first learning moment too. When I reached for the wood conditioner, we were out. And I couldn’t bother to pack the kids back up in the car to go get more. So I charged ahead with staining the piece.

Most of the bed frame took the stain really well, but I did have to work fast because the piece was dry and it absorbed quickly. In some parts, it really absorbed before I could wash it off. These panels turned out darker than the rest of the wood but not enough to ruin the big girl bed frame for my big little girl.

Glow Up:

This is my favorite part. Arguably it took the longest as well as the paint needed to fully dry before adding additional coats or layers. And I learned a good bit through this process.

It’s been a minute since I painted anything detailed. And I went into this project with a few understandings. The first, my brain doesn’t do well with mirror images and keeping things even. In fact it likes to play tricks on me and I’ve had to overcome that a good bit in my schooling. The second acceptance is that I have kids and limited time for projects that involve paint. The minute they see paint or a brush they become an octopus with laser like focus and sharp reflexes.

Research:

Having stained the big girl bed frame, I really had one shot at this. I was able to get a bit of paint off here and there when mistakes were made. However, it was a lot easier to go over them with paint. So I needed to do my research and be fairly settled on a design before even cracking a sample of paint. Pinterest was where most of my research was conducted and there were a lot of gorgeous examples that were so intricately detailed! I pulled a few elements that I felt comfortable with and came up with a daisy and tulip motif. These worked as I already had wall paint samples in these colors so no additional money was spent on paint.

Initially this reel was my inspiration. I planned to get a white head board and use this as a jumping off point. Isn’t it so cute?? Jump over to instagram and give Duygu a follow!

The Paint:

The hubs thought we’d have to buy paint for this but I was determined to use what we had. Both of our kids’ rooms have a simple mural. I planned to pull colors from both of these to create the motif on the bed frame. The only potential hiccup here is that wall paint is water based, and the stain we had used was oil based. According to the gents at Lowe’s this would not work at all, hands down, the end, period.

Only it did work.

Why not buy the paint for this big girl bed frame and not risk ruining it? My plan required at least six colors of paint. The smallest option of oil based paint would have left me with way too much paint left over. And these paints are not cheap. Even limiting the flowers to one color would have totally blown this budget totally out of the water. We really wanted to use what we had so we found a way to make that work. When we showed them a picture of the wall paint on the stain they were in literal disbelief. I wish I was joking.

After I was finished with the motif, we sealed the whole thing with an oil based polyurathane. I wanted to go water based because of the paint, but the other opinions won out. My only gripe is that it did tint the paint just ever so slightly. It’s not terrible because it just ages the look of the big girl bed frame just a bit. It’s an antique so it works!