Around the time I decided not to use my old table anymore (it was enormous, because I'd had an enormous sofa, but I was down-sizing all my furniture a piece at a time), one of my neighbors had a garage sale, but for some reason, nobody bought his old coffee table...
...which was understandable. I mean, look at it. BUH. It was missing the drawer on the front, and the finish was horribly marred and scratched. There was kiddie graffiti all over it, gum stuck underneath it, and places where the wood had been cut into purposely with a fork some strange sort of child's furni-torture device; and the stain...I believe this particular color is Minwax's "Agent Orange." I caught up with my neighbor after the garage sale, and he said, "No, please, it's yours if you want it. Just get it out of my driveway, I hate this thing."
Free furniture to refinish? Brilliant!
So the first task was to disassemble the whole thing, and strip down the parts to the bare wood so it could be completely re-stained from the ground up. I split the top and cut a foot of wood out of the center(and the end aprons) to make the table narrower: 24x42" instead of a nearly-square 36x42".
Here you can see the various stages of refinishing the piece: the first leg is in the middle of being sanded down - most of it is still the original orange-y "oak" color. After the bare wood was smoothed and cleaned, I hit it with two coats of Minwax's "Bombay Mahogany", a very deep browny-red (second and third leg in the picture). Over that went a coat of "Jacobean" (a deep neutral brown, one of my favorite stains), and then about fifty million coats of clear "Polycrylic" to give the piece a deep, deep shine.
On the table's surface, after the Mahogany but before the Jacobean, I stenciled a design that I adapted from a wallpaper motif that I saw online, with plain old 99-cent acrylic craft paints. The Jacobean coat went over that, and various random rubbings and wipings occurred, to give the painted motif an aged, halfway-worn-off look. I wanted the piece to look old, worn, faded - but well cared for...
And I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out. It was a pain in the BUTT trying to get the stain to do what I wanted to over the paint - but a fun pain in the butt, if that makes any sense. The Mahogany on the top of the table came out lighter than on the legs, so the top ended up getting another coat of that before the Jacobean went on. I went over it with the aforementioned fifty bajillion coats of Polycrylic, and then attached a bead trim to the edges of the apron, and slider-feet to the legs to keep it from marring the floors.
Tr-drrr!
About a year and a half after I finished this, I was given a pair of wonderful, fuzzy, black kittens, who, it turns out, LOVE BEADS LIKE WHOA. I have to staple them back on about once a month, lol. Whatever. :) It remains one of my very favorites of the pieces I've refinished and/or built.
Minwax "Agent Orange"....bwahahahaha.
ReplyDeleteI can tell your readers that the beaded trim looks far better in person than it does in the pic above. This is one awesome coffee table.