Easy Ways to Distress Wood

AMY: Sometimes when you're working on a project, you might want it to look a little bit older than it is. You want to give it a little history and I can teach you how to do that, really easily.

Take an inexpensive wood, this is poplar, and a few simple tools just to mark it up a bit and make it look like it's been around the block. I like to knock down the edges. I think those are typically the first things that go. So I'm taking a coarse-grit sandpaper on a sanding block -- and just softening the edges a little bit.

Then I'm gonna give it some marks. Simple claw hammer is a good tool to kind of ding up the edges. The trick is to not use too many of the same exact motions, because then you'll end up with a pattern and we want this to look random -- and that actually takes a little effort.

This is my favorite technique. Grab your hardware, make a pile -- and dance on the wood. . . . Now that it's all dinged up I want to go over it with a two-twenty-grit sandpaper to just kind of smooth it out. After you got the marks the way you want them, and you've gone over it with a little two-twenty-grit sandpaper, take the stain of your choice and -- I like to use a little rag applicator -- you want to make sure you get stain into all of your dings. Because if they stay un-stained, they look brand new. And then before it's dry, come back and wipe off the excess.

So after this dries, I'm gonna hit it a little bit more with sandpaper, and I'll end up with something that looks pretty much like that. And that's a really easy way to distress wood.

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