My Latest Project

This is our dining room before picture. There's nothing really wrong with it. I actually like it a lot. The problem is the table you see here is falling apart--it's being held together with a wire hanger wrapped around the base and bolts. The chairs are super wobbly and about to break. Not to mention we have about grown out of it. We are 5 now and it's a little crowded. I prefer the boys not be able to touch each other while eating.

So I turned to my buddy "Craig" a.k.a. craigslist, and found a great table for $250. It is totally solid. Without the leaf lettes it's 60 inches and with them it extends to 96 inches--perfect for when we have people over. It came with 6 matching chairs. It's a slightly darker stain, which matches my piano. Someone told me once, a room looks more put together if all the woods in the room are the same color. Since we have an open "great room" floor plan for our kitchen, living room and dining room, the piano is not to far from the table. So now all of our flooring, cabinets and trim match and then all our wood furniture matches.

We have a lot of wood, appropriate for living in the forest. Plus I really like wood, it always feels warm and homie.

Anyway, the reason the table and chairs from craislist were so cheap is the surface of the table was badly damaged as you can see here.


It was pretty much like this all over the top of it. Coaster neglect and I'm pretty sure no one ever used a hot pad.

I was not intimidated by this project since Mike and I have refinished our floors in 3 different houses, not to mention I refinished our current table top. I was hoping to lightly sand the top, match the stain and put several coats of polyurethane on it making it little boy friendly. But matching the stain proved to be very difficult as you can see here.

Because of the seal already on it and the age of the table, the stain absorbed differently and despite trying several colors, I couldn't get a decent match.

So I decided to bust out the belt sander.

The challenge with the belt sander is keeping the table smooth and not making divots in it. The belt sander is pretty hard core. I used 60 grit sand paper and in a couple of hours the entire finish was completely off. This broom came in pretty handy. Sixty grit leaves the table pretty rough, so I went over it again with 120 and then 220.

Now the table was ready to stain. But I was pretty dusty. ( =

It's important to do a test spot, let it dry and compare.

It's ok if the table top surface is slightly off, since the light hits it totally different, but you want to get as close as you can.

So after the stain and 5 coats of polyurethane, (I don't mess around, better an extra coat, than not enough.) here's the finished table top ready to be remounted to the base.


So here's the before picture again:


And after:



I think we need to have someone over for dinner Sunday!