Hi all,

Sorry it’s been a while – work – you know how it is 🙂

Those of you who have been following my blog will know that I did a post a while back considering how to base the table. I didn’t know whether to try and put down some paving across the entire board, or if I should just texture the board and call it bare earth.

Well, I juggled with it, read some of your opinions and then decided that I was going to texture the base, paint it a stone colour, then add patches of snow/ice.

So, this post is all about how I textured my board using pre mixed wood filler, or spackle, if you’re State side.

First of all buy yourself a good sized tub of filler, then you want to splash in a bit of water so it looks like this:

Then take a cheap and clean house painting brush and paint on the white water. This stuff that you’re painting on will be like skimmed milk. It’s sitting on the surface of your filler. Give it a gentle stir with your brush, but don’t try and mix it in too much, you’re going for a thin consistency afterall.

You want to paint it all over your MDF board, in my case obviously avoiding the roads. If you find you’re leaving thick brush strokes then it’s too thick.

The object of this little exercise is to seal the board. MDF absorbs water like a sponge, so a layer of watered down filler will put up a protective barrier against your paint to prevent warping later on (hopefully!).

So, when you’ve layered on the white water, it’ll look like this:

And when you’ve done the whole lot, leave it to dry for a while, in the heat of outside it only took about 15 minutes.

When it’s dry it’ll look like this:

Next, take a look at your pot of filler. You may have had to top up the water as you’ve been doing this little exercise, and that’s fine, but now you may want to pour some of that excess surface liquid away. You’re aiming for this much:

You will need to keep topping this up, and there’s definitely a sweet spot for how moist it needs to be. You’ll have to figure that out with trial and error.

What you want to do next is splat your cleaned house painting brush into the filler and then stipple it onto your board. Too much water and you’ll make soup, not enough and the filler will barely transfer.

Like I said, find the sweet spot 🙂

Make sure that you don’t brush it though, we don’t want visible brush strokes, we just want little dimples of texture…

This is a little time consuming and slightly annoying (haha). Basically, I’d just about got the knack as I finished my last board. Typical eh?

The finished product wants to look like this:

Let it dry. Again, this didn’t take long for me. When it’s dry run your hand over it to roughly remove any sharp spikes that you’ve left, and then voila, you’re ready for painting.

That will have to wait for another day though!

I hope you’ve found this useful, and it was worth waiting for! Dorp me a comment if you have any questions. Also, if you’ve not done it yet, it would be supper cool if you could help me grow by liking my facebook page by following the button below.

Jimmi Waz ‘Ere

Thanks for reading,

Jimmi