Easter Break: Mommy plays at table refinishing

It all started with this leg...hard to see, but there's a lovely crack that severs the top from the bottom completely in half! Boy am I curious how THAT happened! Not to mention the rest of it: totally hashed-looking, but...with potential! Tony & I whittled the price down to $60 in response to their proposed $130 (!) at a local garage sale in good ol' Rexburg (similar ones sell for around $500-$1,000!). The pros: 2 leaves to make an 8 ft table of solid wood-awesomeness (er, minus the leg), 2 benches & 2 chairs. Tony did a serious wood-glue job, we covered the top with a tablecloth & declared it good enough for the next nearly 4 years (that's how long it took me to make a friend who offered to let me use her sander :) !

Unfortunately, this is the only 'before' picture I have of the top w/out the table cloth (the boys are standing on it. That's right after we moved in to the last place we were in). But, you can get the idea from the pics of the benches:

Goldy, oldy, moldy wood-color with a bazillion dirt-colored dents, nicks & ouchies. That was our table. Honestly, the top of the table was a lot worse than the benches, just use your imagination...

 

And these pics show the chairs...dingy colors, & yummy stains from who-knows-whats...and believe you me, Oxy Stain Remover & I worked hard to get it that 'good.'

 Not bad from a distance; though, potential, you see...

Next came the initial sanding & stain...not water-based so my topcoat of choice (minus toxins, from THIS website-- I had to save my pennies for awhile, though, but totally worth it & their customer service was the best I've dealt with in years!) wouldn't stick I was told, so sanding #2 took place (after a few months break for me to get over the frustration of having to do it again). After going through another color stain supposedly 'walnut' but looking more like a red-oak type color I applied this *true* walnut color...

I was giddy in love, ask my good friend Ginny who was there when I did it :) However, because of a mistake on my part, and the fact that the sanding didn't take away all of the issues/took away too much in some weaker spots, I decided to sand it a bit & go more with the old farmhouse table look. And then I sanded some more, and a bit more, and more, until I came up with this (before the topcoats):

I loved it more already...and then it started to hit me: dark tables show everything, every new nick, every crumb, every mistake...this makes the old ones look like they were on purpose, and the new ones will be right at home! I love it when I'm a genius on accident :)

5 layers of top coats later, here's the final product (too bad I didn't take better pictures 'just table' pictures when it was in the light-filled living room for Easter dinner):

Don't you just love a good knot? Mmmm, I do, I really do.

 And here are the chairs. I used Annie Sloan's Chalk Paint in 'Old White' (no sanding or  priming needed, PERFECT!). Again, gotta love the distressing to cover up the 'love' it will surely experience at our house. 

And this is my first attempt at a slipcover of my own creation (that's why there aren't any up-close pictures, let's just say it was a great learning experience...). Made from a durable, stain-resistant paint drop cloth, piping out of the same (not hard at all to make your own!) and just a teensy little skirt over the edges--don't want to cover those pretty {chair} legs.

Epilogue o' the leg: It's still broken. The price to replace all 4 legs (since it would be even more to have just 1 custom-made leg) would be about $200. So, we decided to deal with it as-is until it breaks & then decide then what to do at that point (like pray to find a cheap table that has legs that would fit...or maybe I just need to learn how to turn legs myself, yeah...).

Now, on to my next project: