Best Beginner DIY Project: How To Use Rustoleum Milk Paint On A Coffee Table

I am a DIY nut these days, dreaming up new designs and projects to start in our new home – this month’s project? Repainting an old partisan table with classic white Rustoleum milk paint! It turned out to be a perfect addition to the sun room.

If this is your first time to my blog, Honey & Betts, welcome! I’m Hannah, you can find me at @honeyandbetts on Instagram + Facebook + Pinterest + Twitter. What you don’t know about me is that my husband and I raised 3 little girls in a 2 bedroom + 2 bathroom apartment in downtown Edmonton while he was finishing university. Once we was finished school we moved out to the suburbs of Edmonton and now live in St. Albert in a beautiful house we call home now (you can see our whole house in the post)! And now that I have a house to nest in I have gone to town in the DIY project department. 

Our first project were these brilliant white wall mounted shoe organizers, it’s one of my most popular posts right now! 

Once that project was finished I wanted to furnish and style our sun room – I inheritted two arm chairs from my great grandparents and knew we needed a similarly styled table but in white. Unfortunately, an antique coffee table in white is hard to come by… so I set myself up on Kijiji (it’s a Canadian Craigslist, but better in my opinion) and watched for unique wood tables that I could repaint.

It didn’t take long to find a table that I loved for a reasonable price! You can see in the first image of this post the dark stained appearance of the table when I picked it up.

I got to work right away sanding the dark finish away, and I mistakenly used too high of a sandpaper grit and it took me forever to do the whole thing! What a rookie mistake! I did not ask my husband for help, and once he realized the grit I was using he set me straight.

I had researched how to strip the stain from a DIY blogger I had never seen used, I used the exact grit she recommended and it bit me in the behind! Next time I will certainly cross reference my findings and ask my husband before I spend an entire day striping a dark wood table.

It was an embarrassing mistake that left many blisters on my hands!

So, that leaves us with what happened after the table was sanded, I wiped it with a tack cloth and mixed my white Rustoleum milk paint.

Here are a few things I learned from using the Rustoleum milk paint:

Preferably, use a paint brush. I used a paint roller and it applied it way thicker than it should have been. I’m happy with the results but it doesn’t look like true milk paint. Milk paint applies thin and requires many layers by brush to build an intricate colour. By using the roller it evenly applied it and comes off looking like chalk paint. Like I said, I’m happy but I read online (seriously, cross reference what you read online peopel!) you can successfully apply it with a roller. I am saying, don’t do that.

Let it sit for as long as possible. I believe the Rustoleum milk paint jar’s instructions read you need to let it sit for 15 minutes, if you can wait 30 minutes then wait the 30 minutes. I separately mixed the first and second paint coats, and saw better paint texture when I waited longer the first time (30 minutes) than the second time (15 minutes).

Protect it. I read over and over and over the differences between milk paint vs. chalk paint because I wanted to make the right decision for this DIY coffee table project. One of the biggest struggles was how to protect the surface once it was painted. Milk paint is fairly new on the main market, and mostly everyone (online) says use wax but I didn’t want the mess of wax. So I ended up using the Rustoleum Clear Ultra Matte Protective Topcoat For Chalked Paint. It mattifies and adds that extra level of protection to the high traffic surface of the coffee table.

Over all I am going to have to use Rustoleum’s milk paint again on our next DIY project, as I have some left over. It is packaged in a powder that you add water to, so it stores very nicely and applied odorless. 

Hopefully on my next repainting project I can apply the lessons I learned from this coffee table!

Are you using Rustoleum’s milk paint on your next project?

If you like this post, check out my DIY Project section before you go!

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