Saturday, September 24, 2011

Channeling the DIY'er


Our new house has a formal dining room and an eat-in kitchen. Which was kind of a bummer to me because I didn't really want a formal dining room. I mean, how often does one even use that room? Our counter-top height table that we've had for a few years seemed a bit big for the eat-in kitchen so we decided to put it in the formal dining room. I really wanted the Charlotte table and chairs from World Market (looked all over for a photo!) but World Market was sold out of them. We called all the Houston area World Markets and were bummed. And we love World Market furniture, it's really well made and I love the style. I told a couple friends we wanted a white pedestal table for our eat-in kitchen but I was having a hard time finding one.

When we were on vacation to Michigan for Dave and Catherine's wedding, a friend texted me that she had found an oak table and chairs at Goodwill for $70.00 and if we wanted it, she would have her hubby pick it up for us. I have been wanting to try my hand at painting furniture so we said "yes, pleease!"

So I was going to do this FANTASTIC blog post on how I made over the oak Goodwill table. It was going to be awesome, full of photos of the products I used, photos of us in action working on it, etc.

However, the camera I used was our dual purpose family camera/Jon's 3104Studios camera. And we had a little miscommunication while Jon was finishing up a side job and the photos got deleted. Yup. Booooooo.

So this is what you get. No whining (this is a phrase I use a lot).

I don't have a before photo now, but here's a picture of the table after it was I used an electric sander on it. I first sanded with a very coarse paper, and then went over it with a higher grit. And yes my arms felt like they were going to fall off.




The table had some spots where it bubbled up on the top, so I used wood filler in those spots, and then sanded over them a few times to create an even surface.


After the sanding it twice, I primed it.


I then used antique white paint (matched to the antique white spray paint I used on the chairs) and painted two coats. I finished it off with two coats of polycrylic to hopefully seal the table and make it a little durable. Here's the finished product:


For the chairs, we spray painted them with primer. Then spray painted 2 coats of antique white. Then spray painted a sealant on them. I am not too happy with the coverage of the spray paint, but I thought it'd be easier than painting them by hand. I'm also not super pumped about the look of these chairs so I'm calling them "temporary". We'll see. :) I also put two coats of polycrylic on these.

Overall, I'm pretty darn happy with the results. I know the table and chairs will get dinged up from use over time, and I'm totally okay with that. I actually thought about distressing them myself but figured it would happen over time eventually.

Whew, this post made me tired. Time to go eat chocolate chip cookies with the hubs. Adios!

2 comments:

Erin Zubert said...

I know the chairs aren't your style, but man the paint helps. I think it looks great Chaeli--way to go!!

Jennifer said...

You did a great job! We like World Market furniture too. Our kitchen table and chairs are from there and so is our bedroom furniture.