I hadn’t realized the wax was compatible with poly. I will do that!

Yeah! I was just going to get back to you the other day when I saw this comment come through, so glad it worked for you, I was really trying to figure out where the discrepancy could have been. Do you love it? I highly recommend two coats of satin poly if you haven’t already done so.

Update: all is better now! Wow, what amazing stuff. My table is gorgeous and I couldn’t be happier. :) I think my issue before what that the wax was too cold to load onto my brush properly. After a few days of softening, it was like butter to use. I ended up leaving the Dust of Ages off the second time around, but that’s just because things look SO good after the wax.
Thanks again for your advice!

Kari – Are you using the dark antique wax, there are a few different color options available, so I just want to make sure. It looks like this:

Thank you for your suggestions! I’m going to sand it down today and try the wax again. I followed all of the buffing and curing instruction really well, but the wax was never dark enough for my taste in the first place. I’m going to work hard on getting it darker… did you find that warming the wax helped it to adhere to your brush? Part of my problem was the even the Dark Antique Wax was almost translucent on my pine. How did you get yours so dark?

Kari! Nuts! Sorry to hear that. I have a few questions for you: Did you like the finish of just the dark wax prior to the Dust of Ages? If so, you can always sand down the finish and just do the wax. When applying the wax did you offload onto cardboard first, as to not apply too much wax – this could be why so much dust of ages adhered to the surface? Did you buff out the wax after 20 minutes – before applying dust of ages? Did you thoroughly buff the dust of ages into the wax?

For me, there was a lot of wiggle room when working with the Amy Howard products, so I am very confident that you too can achieve the look you’re after. I would try and do a little more buffing today, maybe even try reapplying another layer of the wax, and see what you think. It’s not a lost cause so don’t worry too much.

One other suggestion is to take a scrap piece of wood like I did, and play around with a few of the effects you can get, maybe doing that will take a bit of the guess work out of how you proceed from here.

I’m here to help, so let me know what other suggestions I can offer.

Also, that dust of ages is messy stuff, I had my vacuum on hand to clean up the floors and other surfaces while I worked.

Thanks for the chance :)

I’ve seen other people (on the internet) use the Amy Howard brand for this exact application. Is there a way you could test it out on one cabinet first? It seems pretty durable and touch ups seem like they would be super easy. I’d just finish it with either a wax, or a coat of poly, or something. It might not be a bad idea to e-mail the folks at Amy Howard at Home to see what they recommend.

I repainted my cabinets with regular paint and just had to touch up a few corners this fall (two years deep). I think touch ups are probably inevitable no matter what the paint.

Yeah! Do it. It wasn’t very hard and just required a little math (subtraction) and a bit of common sense. Use some sort of straight edge and a square to line up the “little drill holes” (so technical), and then use those new “little drill holes as a guide to place the hardware bracket. I used a mouse sander to soften the edges after I had assembled it all. I cut my bench top down to 40″ (originally 54″ and a fraction) and trimmed off 14” from the top and long skirt pieces FYI.

Thank you! Sorry if it wasn’t clear where I used wax and paint. The legs and skirt are painted black, and then I added a layer of light colored wax, followed up with the liming wax which accentuates the brush strokes and gives it that “lived in” look. I think the waxes give the paint a lot of depth and dimension, which looks completely amazing with the matte black base. The table top was just a layer of dark wax followed up with a light dusting (and buffing) of dust of ages. The photos were all taken before I poly’d the top, so what you see is the actual look of the table with wax on it.

I’ll for sure let you guys know the next time I get carried away with the Amy Howard paints and waxes. The applications seem endless!