decorating

The great table adventure

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I have this idea that refinishing furniture isn’t that hard, and also that I’m good at DIY projects. The first of these ideas I’m realizing isn’t nearly as true as I want to believe. I’m still holding on to the second.

For awhile I’ve wanted to refinish our dining room table because the finish has dulled and there was some water damage. I should qualify this and all previous furniture refinishing attempts by stating that none of our Chinese made furniture was expensive. It was ridiculously not expensive, in fact, which is why I seem to willy nilly throw my amateur furniture skillz at it. I don’t have much to lose.

I did decide though that it would be best to attempt only to redo the top part of our table. I’m ambitious, but I’m not dumb.

This is our table as it was:

This was right when we bought. Before the dulling and the water damaging. But it was always a little darker than I wanted, which is what happens when you pay a guy $200 to custom build a table. It won’t be exactly like that Pottery Barn table.

My first order of business was to strip it with my handy dandy Citristrip. It’s this neon peach gel that takes most of the stain right off. Then I sanded it, and put down one coat of dark walnut. It looked really cool. I put down another coat. It looked even cooler. Erik said it was good. I thought it could be a little better, so I put down one more coat. Not cool.

So it was back to this. Stripped it down again. Thank God for Citristrip! But it didn’t seem to get the stain off quite as well as the first time.

Consequently the stain didn’t go down as evenly this time either. But I was happy to be able to see the grain of the wood, something I’d always wanted. This time I quit while I was ahead.

Then came sealing it. A friend recommended using lacquer instead of polyurethane. I started with 2 cans. By the end I’d bought 10. It still continued to have this uneven shine. Argh.

So I sanded off the shine, and pulled out a can of finishing wax. I threw on two coats and called it good. It looks better in person, actually. But there it is. My great table adventure.

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Our Traffic Sign Coffee Table

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In China, the concept of color is a little different, particularly when dealing with household items. I spent half an hour arguing with the men who delivered carpet to our first apartment because we had ordered tan and what they brought was gray. They insisted it was the same color. Later, we ordered dark forest green couches and they came a lovely bright grass green. Again, we were told essentially, “same same.” The worst was when I chose chocolate brown curtains and what arrived at my house was, well, what would you call the color of what comes out of a baby the first few weeks? Yeah, that. And I was told, “sometimes the color is a little bit different.”
So I shouldn’t have been surprised when I asked for a coffee table to be made to match this lovely antique piece:
And what I got was this traffic sign yellow table:

I was warned that it wouldn’t look totally like the top piece because it wasn’t actually going to be antique, but this really wasn’t what I had in mind. With it laying on its side, you can’t fully appreciate how incredibly bright yellow it is.

But honestly, this seemed like a fun challenge to me and truth be told I’m kind of bored these days so I went to work sanding off the brightness. I did it once already, but it was still pretty bright, so here’s attempt #2:

You can see that on the legs they did make the effort to antique it up a little, and I was able to keep the look of it there. The top I’ve just managed to tone down.

I’m not sure if I’m quite done (well, I haven’t sealed it so I know I’m not) or if I might try to even out the color on top, but at least it isn’t stopping traffic anymore. Now useless note to self: be more specific when describing colors to Chinese workers.

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DIY

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Pinterest and HGTV have given me unrealistic expectations for my house and overinflated views of my DIY prowess. How hard can it be? Those people on TV are doing it! Never mind that they have professionals standing off camera to keep them from stapling their own hands to the wall. I can do it! This is how I think.

So given a new house and a limited no budget for professional helpers, I have chosen to embrace the unrealistic and overinflated parts of me in order to make a few changes.

Nothing crazy – just some painting, refinishing, nailing, that kind of thing. So far it’s turning out pretty well. The first thing was a coffee table I had made unfinished because I didn’t know what color I wanted. I was doing well on my own until I tried to add a wee bit more color of a stain/polyurethane mix that ended up clumping and generally looking terrible. I resanded it and tried again. I was trying to match the Chinese doors in the corner but this was as close as I could get.

Coffee table before
And after
For my next trick, I wanted to redo the dining room. In the original pictures, I liked the chair rail the previous owners had, but upon inspection it wasn’t a style I liked. We decided to keep the two color theme, but I bought new chair rail, sprayed it white, and Erik installed it last night during my Benadryl induced stupor.
Before
After
The lighting isn’t as good in the second picture, but you get the idea. On the left something I got from Hobby Lobby – this heavy black metal thing I painted yellow and distressed a little. It’s going to go on the wall as soon as I figure out what else to put with it.

There are other projects in the works. So far so good! Lots of fun.

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Colors!

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I love color, especially on my walls. To me, white walls are just a canvas – they must have color.

Apparently, the previous owners of our house were kindred spirits in this regard, although the argument could and will be made that they took it a little too far.

When we first walked into our living room, we could see not one, not two, but five colors: dark red, yellow, orange, aqua, and peach. This is beyond “feature wall.” It’s not just in the living area though – it’s throughout the house. Usually it’s two walls of one color and one wall of another, like in our bathroom, the office, and the laundry room.

We think the logic went, “Hmm . . . I bought this gallon of orange to do one wall in the laundry room, but I still have more. Let’s do another wall. What – still more? Let’s do that little bit of the hallway.” This logic was applied repeatedly throughout the house, so that one of the blues in the media room shows up on two walls of the office. Another one of them appears in our bathroom. The other color in our bathroom is also in the kids’ bathroom. The yellow in part of the dining room matches the other two walls in the office. And then there’s that odd space in Ethan’s room where they seemed to have started sponge painting with a Twinkie and then gave up (maybe they sensed the Twinkie’s impending doom and chose to eat it instead).

All this I would like to remedy. Thankfully, some of the colors I actually like and would have chosen myself, so our bedroom and the guest room will remain the same.

Thankfully down the street (and by “down the street” I mean, “the closest stores to us, which are still about 5 miles away”) there is a Sherwin Williams store which has delightful names for their colors like On the Rocks and Dill and Pebblestone, all of which will be making appearances in our home. It also seems to be where the previous owners purchased paint. Using my otherwise fairly useless minute color difference spotting skills acquired during my stint as a photographic technician in a one-hour photo store I managed to pick out the colors they used on the walls we’d like to keep, so we can cover the ones we don’t.

Tomorrow, we paint!

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