How To Age New Wood

I recently got two honking big lamps in the mail. Now, I had planned to age my article side table. But with the size of the lamp, I decided to build a whole new side table. I thought I’d share how to age new wood as this will be a great resource to send people to if they ever have questions.

First thing is first: You can do this method on any wood. New + Old. But since most of us are working with new wood like pine, I thought I’d share my foul proof method to age new wood, the easy way!

There is really no rhyme or reason to this method, but it’s actually super fun. I took about 6-7 random metal objects and started beating up my table.

The objects I used to make my wood look super beat up were a hand saw, chain, hammer, ax and a few other random metal objects I had laying in my garage.

Once your side table has the amount of dents in it, you want to take your jigsaw or handsaw and make cut into the edges of the side table. I promise, it will look good.

Then take your orbital sander and buff everything out. The key is to make it look used and abused while still looking polished.

And the LAST step is to take a wire wheel attachment for a cordless drill ( You can also just purchase a wire scrubber ) and scrub your wood to give it a ton of texture.

This makes the wood look super aged and weathered.

If you look at the photo above, all the areas where it shows darker stain, that’s where I hit it with my ax.

For colour, I used two different methods. I used a medium brown stain for the first coat and then for the top layer I used water down paint to take the orange hue out.

I of course sealed it with a varnish once the paint had dried.

And that’s how to age new wood. It’s a fast and simple process!