aibu to want to paint antique mahogany furniture?

[biggles50]

Have inherited over time huge great hunks of furniture. Including a mahogany dresser and display cupboard. Don't want to be hoardy and hold onto them but they are so dark and seem to suck in the light. I used to love them but think I might paint them. Dh thinks this a terrible thing because they're antique they're mahogany they're fine as they are. To me they're huge blocks of dark nearly ceiling high. Aibu to give them a lick of paint?

Getting paint to adhere to mahogany isn't easy. Some comes off easily and the furniture can look shit pretty soon after. I'd sell them.

As someone who works within the auction business I have to say huge hunks of brown furniture don't sell awfully well atm. As a nation out homes are getting smaller so the demand for them is pretty low and just because they are 150 years old won't necessarily make them worth selling. If you are going to keep them then paint the things if it is what you fancy - almost all old furniture in our area is bought cheaply by those planning exactly what you are then flogging it in an 'I saw you coming' kind of shop.

How do you know that if you sell them, someone else won't paint them?

Do what makes you happy.

As some of the previous posters have said, it really depends on whether the furniture is decent in the first place. If it is, then obviously sell it and get something you like.

The "shabby chic" idea is that you have a piece of furniture that's worn, battered, and destined for the bin and you slap some Annie Sloane on it to perk it up and get it to match your existing colour scheme. If it's done well, an old and crappy piece of furniture will have several more years use in it, which is nice if you can't afford furniture that isn't at the bottom of the secondhand pile.

But doing it to something that's actually a decent piece of furniture, especially if you've not had much practice, can be a shame.

There is no nationally recognised scale on which taste can be assessed! Taste is personal, and sneering at others taste doesn't really achieve anything except making you look like hyacinth bouquet :)

Are you sure they're mahogany? Mahogany isn't dark.

Could it be that there are old layers of varnish making it look dark? Or has it been stained dark?

If so stripping it and using a clear satin varnish would improve how it looks.

I'm going to paint some old furniture I've been given. It's mahogany but from the 1980s so by no means antique. It's too big and dark for our space, but given to us by family so for sentimental reasons I'd rather freshen them up than sell them.

We were given an Edwardian (Georgian repro) mahogany table. Not really my taste but it has sentimental value for us so we wanted to keep it. It was dark brown and had so much polish on it was matt and tacky to the touch. We got it professionally stripped and resurfaced and it's like a new piece of furniture. Much lighter in colour and super-sleek and shiny.