Old Table Gets a New Life

  

I'm really excited to share my new dining room table with you. It has been a labor of love.

I've had a plan to paint/stain it for a while but I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do with it. I thought of some colors, I thought of all white, I thought of all stained. I just couldn't make up my mind. So it waited... and waited... and waited. Ten months later I made my move. 

When we moved into our first home in March 2009, we acquired some left-overs. Some good, some not-so-good. One of the left-overs was a sturdy old oak dining table. It was in great shape, but in my opinion,  super out dated. The verdict: and it down the the raw & get to work! I decided on a dark walnut stain. I mixed a Medium dark and a really dark stain together to get a, what I like to call... dark-but not black stain. Like this...

  

I applied it and left it over night. The next morning I awoke to find a super duper uneven messy staining job. We decided the sanding job wasn't quite as raw as we had hoped. Some of the old poly has managed to stick around, therefore the stain wasn't soaking up as evenly as it should have.  So Ryan got to work some more. The oak table had a previous  thick poly shine, so it was really hard to get down to the raw wood. He bought a 60 grit, and worked his way up through 80, and then 120. 

 

I decided to beat the wood up a bit to give it an aged look. I purchased 3 feet of metal chain from Lowe's. I took the chain and beat up the top of the table. It was actually a lot of fun, and got some aggression out for sure.

I think my dogs were a little scared of me + beating chains, they all ran for shelter- far away from me. Note to all of you who might try this: be careful! The chain recoils faster than you think, I have two deep bruises on my fingers where I got hit with the chain. Probably not the smartest decision I've ever made. Wear heavy gloves! 

 

I also busted out a hammer and gave the table a few smacks, that's actually where most of the dings came from Use both ends of the hammer, the nail removing end actually works great, but be sure to move it around a lot or you will end up with a lot of "snake bite" looking marks. . Just stick to that method, no chains needed. Save your fingers!

 

So.... Once the table was sanded down super good. I applied two coats of stain. Between each coat I let it sit for about 10 minutes and then rubbed the excess off with a clean rag. After the two coats, I let it sit for about 24 hours.

 

Check out this post to see how I made up the chairs.

  

During that time I applied two coats of Valspar's Homestead Resort Jefferson White (Best creamy white paint ever!). Then I distressed the edges and sides a bit.

  

  

  

To top it off, I applied a Satin wipe-on Poly to the entire table. Wa- La, that's it. A brand new table for under $20 bucks. I can say that because the table was free, the paint I already had from my fireplace revamp, I had half of the stain so I only spend about $5 stain, and I already had the wipe-on poly, and I spend a little over $12 on sand paper.
You can also check out this post where I gave the old chairs a face-lift 

  

  

 

 

 

 

Thank you for stopping in. If you want to see the China Hutch in the  background's Before & After click on the picture below.