Tint Your Wood Filler

An APC Retailer’s Tip

We here at APC have a great community of retailers who have a vast array of knowledge and experience when it comes to refinishing furniture pieces. And because they’re gracious, they share and pass these tips along. This tip today is brought to you by Frank Rothell, from Cool and Collected Antiques. A tip so simple, yet brilliant, we’re sure you’ll find it useful in your next refinishing project – tint your wood filler!

Often when refinishing a wood piece, you might come across some deep scratches, dents in the veneer. Sometimes the veneer has even been torn off. In order to even out the piece, wood filler is often used, filling in the scratches or making up for the torn veneer. However, Frank notices that can cause problems with the overall finish if you plan on doing some distressing.  

Wood filler is generally that light tan/putty color. When you paint a piece that you’ve used wood filler on and you want to distress it a bit you run the chance of sanding down to that tan/putty color and [it] does not look very nice.

So how about add a little paint to said wood filler? Frank is a genius! He states:

I add a little paint to my wood filler, using the same color I’m going to paint the piece in. The color won’t be an exact match. But once it’s fully painted and I sand it down for a distressed look, it will still blend in nicely.

Frank refinished a desk using this technique. As he was painting the top with Cannonball, he tinted his wood filler with the same color.

Once the wood filler had dried, he painted it with Cannonball. As he stated, it wasn’t a perfect match, but it definitely looks better than that beigey color wood filler coming through.  With the paint dry, a little sand distressing blended it all in nicely.

Try out this trick yourself and let us know how it works for you! Project submissions here at APC are automatically entered to win a $100 gift box with beloved APC products!