I love to find great pieces of furniture to upcycle. Sometimes I find a piece and know right away what I want to do with it. Sometimes I think about it for a while before I start the make over. I spent some time thinking about this project and even thought I had a good idea of what I wanted the end result to be, this project changed several times during the process.
I started by sanding the tops of these tables in hopes of staining the wood inlay. I decided to try out a wood stripper for the edges of the top to remove all of the stain and polyurethane top coat.
The wood stripper worked great with a stiff nylon brush. It removed all of the original stain from the crevices, but it was really messy. Like REALLY messy. But by far better than trying to sand it out of the crevices. Unfortunately when I tried to stain the top, the stain was not even over the different wood inlays and the wood edge. Sigh 😔 So General Finishes Gel Stain to the rescue! You may remember my post Painting and Staining our stair railing part 2 , I used a mix of GF Nutmeg and Grey. For these tables I used the same mix and it covered the top beautifully.
With that disaster taken care of I painted the body of these tables Annie Sloan Paris Gray. I wanted to add some Pure White and Silver accents. I painted the cut outs on the legs with a small brush and originally I painted the drawers white as well as the corner cut outs. In my head that looked better. In reality it was too much white. So I painted over the drawer fronts and the corner cut outs with Paris Gray.
I distressed it, used a clear and dark wax and then highlighted the buttom edge of the table and legs with Annie Sloan Bright Silver Gilding Wax. This took a while. 😉 But completely worth the time. All of these products help to bring out the shape and character of this piece. The beautiful handles on the drawers got a coat of spray paint and these tables are done!
This wasn’t exactly what I envisioned when I started this project but I love the end product now that they are done.
It takes some time and sometimes several different products but getting to the end of a project is always satisfying. Don’t be afraid to change it up if it’s not working out as you want it to. There’s always a solution if you come across a hiccup.
Leave a comment or a question if you have one!
And as always, thanks for taking a look at my blog 😊
Cindy
