A RARE RUMMAGING FIND

I've been staying out of thrift stores for awhile now because I have instituted a rule of not buying something if I don't have an immediate use for it (and will fix it up within a reasonable amount of time). But I am in a few rummage-type Facebook groups in our area and every so often something pops up that really catches my eye.

So it was with this side table. It's got great mid-century styling and it has obviously been painted, but I like the color and the brass feet are intact. I brought it home and put it in the den/back room and it's absolutely perfect there. I love it to pieces.

Not only a shot of the table, but a rare look at one of the last walls in the house with the horrible texture still on it. Will this winter be the year it finally goes away? We can only hope.

The top has a piece of glass currently has a map under it (it came that way). I think I'll put in a section of a navigational chart in there for now, but I like the idea that you can really change up the look by putting different things under there.

I think I paid $40 for it. I probably should have haggled a bit, but honestly, I liked it enough that I knew I would have no problem paying that.

A DIY SIDE TABLE RESCUED FROM THE LAND OF UNFINISHED PROJECTS

Have you ever started a project and then finished it three years later? I do it more often than I care to say.

I remember when I got this table. After my grandmother died, a lot of the furniture from her house was shifted to the family cottage and some of the furniture from the cottage was up for grabs. One of the items was an old Pottery Barn side table that converted to a game table. It had baked in the sun so the veneer was faded and peeling off in many places.

I grabbed it from the junk pile because I figured it could be a fun piece to experiment on. It could only get better.

Normally this is where I'd show you a photo of the hideous before. And I'm 90% sure I have one. Somewhere. But since I never name my photos, finding it would take a really long time and (insert more excuses here).

I glued down the peeling veneer with some wood glue and sanded the whole thing. Then I stained the top just to bring back the wood color.

I downloaded a quatrefoil pattern off the Internet and transferred it to heavy duty vinyl sticker material. I can't tell you where to get this. I got a piece from a co-worker who makes vinyl decals. After transferring the pattern I painstakingly cut it out using an exacto knife.

When the pattern was cut out, I very carefully started peeling the backing off the part I cut out, since that's the bit I wanted to remain stained, not painted. It took some time to position it properly. The key here was to only peel back about an inch of backing, get that situated on top the table correctly and then slowly peel away the rest of the backing while smoothing down the sticker. It was a little hairy and it would be very difficult with a very intricate pattern, but it worked out fine.

A good sticky primer was the next step, and I used it on the entire table, going right over the top of the vinyl sticker. This was followed by a light sanding and a coat of high gloss paint (Benjamin Moore Aura, which is what I use for most projects).

When the final paint coat was dry to the touch but not completely dry, I peeled off the sticker. In order to keep it from flopping on the painted bits, I cut away the sticker as I pulled it off. In some places it pulled up the edge of the paint a little but I could go back and fix that later.

The only problem was that the paint left a rather noticeable edge where it met the now-exposed wood. So I used 400-grit sandpaper to very carefully knock down the edges. Then I went back and touched up the paint with an artist paintbrush.

All of that left the wood stain looking a little less rich than I had hoped, so I went back with cotton swabs and just touched up the stain, blotting with paper towel as I went.

You gotta love pictures that show off all your sins. This is in the room where we still haven't dealt with the horrible wall texture. On the left side of the photo you can see where I was testing paint samples. That was at least four years ago. With the new table, the art is poorly hung. But hey ... new table, right?

I think this is a look that was probably very in about three years ago and maybe isn't so much anymore, but I like it nonetheless. The drawer still needs a knob but I'm looking for the right one. The table is also probably a tad on the small side for the loveseat it is by, but it replaced a table twice the size and half the height that was there that did nothing but attract clutter, so I'm appreciating the more refined look.

And if nothing else, it is one more forgotten project officially checked off the list.

New table, even newer color

Sometimes I think about my DIY journey and it sort of blows my mind. Six years ago I was scared to try to improve anything I didn't totally hate for fear of screwing it up. Now I have to restrain myself from NOT trying to improve things that are perfectly fine the way they are.

I think the first time I painted something brand new was when I took the can of spray paint to the speakers. By the way, they still work fine, they totally blend in with the wall and I don't regret doing that for one second.

Now I really have no problem painting something new if I can't find what I'm looking for. I've been wanting to get a new side table for between the chairs in front of the fireplace for ages. I had an overly contemporary el cheapo thing there for the last 10 years or so. What I really wanted to find was an old spindle table or maybe something with some faux bamboo that I could paint a fun color. I looked for a LONG time and found nothing that was the right size or in the realm of affordable. 

I orginally saw this side table on Joss & Main. And then I found it on Overstock for significantly less. Those daily sale sites are not always such a great deal, it turns out. 

Even at a really low price, I have to say I was not happy with the quality of this Safavieh table. It is really cheaply made. The top and the shelf on the bottom are made of luan and sort of feels like glorified cardboard. Still, it was cute and I was sick of looking (of course I found a table at Home Goods two weeks ago that would been equally good and was less expensive). 

It came in this perfectly fine gray color.

But you know it wasn't staying that color. I gave it a good dose of Benjamin Moore Cornwallis Red (which I also wrote about here), which is the most lovely orangey tomato red ever. I really have a thing for this color. 

I'm not going to give you a tutorial on how I painted it because you know the drill: Sand, clean, prime, two coats of paint, sand with 400-grit in between coats. Done.

And here it is in its new spot. With all the blue, white and gray in the living room, I think it's the perfect accent and it since its in the red family it works with the ikat dot chairs on the other side of the room too.

It's hard to get shot of our very long and skinny living room that give you an idea of what it looks like, but with the help of a tripod I was able to get one of this view, which is one I don't think I've shown you before. This is what you see when you walk out of the kitchen into the living room and it's what sold me on our house immediately. The lights you see on the mantle are from the track lights that hide on the backside of that beam. I'm still moving them around to figure out where to point them all. By the way, speaking of that painted speaker, there's one in this picture. Can you find it? Also, I am officially the worst mantel decorator ever. I'm actually thinking about making a temporary wood mantel sleeve to put over the stone mantel because I think it would be a lot easier to accessorize up there.

So have you ever painted or otherwise seriously altered something brand new? It's funny how once you just suck it up and do it once, it's not so hard the next time. Yet another slippery DIY slope.

How to salvage a stained marble tabletop

I have been on the hunt for a marble side table for about two years now. I'm pretty sure it's because secretly I would have loved a marble countertop in either the upstairs bathroom or the kitchen but I knew I'd lose my mind with a marble counter. Some people love marble countertops for their patina or are willing to baby them a little, but that person is not me, so I went with no-muss, no-fuss quartz in both places.

But marble is beautiful and I really wanted to bring in a little more white by the blue chair in the living room. Not finding the right thing was just killing me (sometimes I get consumed by these searches) and I was just about to sort of give up and order one from West Elm that I had been eyeing. I liked the table a lot although it was lower than I was looking for and I'm always a little worried to go down the West Elm / Pottery Barn / Ikea road. Its not that I don't love their stuff. It's just that I don't really like it when someone walks in the house and automatically knows where something is from. I already have the Malabar chairs from Pottery Barn (and honestly who doesn't know someone who has or had those chairs) in front of the fireplace so I was just a bit wary of having things look like they were all ordered from a catalog.

West Elm Hex Side Table

Anyway, I was literally on the verge of buying the West Elm table when I decided to do my routine Etsy search for "marble side table" and lo and behold, a new one popped up.

Etsy listing photo

It was this cute little vintage number that cost about half of what that West Elm table cost. It wasn't perfect by any means. The marble top clearly had some stains on it and a few chips. Plus, the legs and the "handle" on the top were shiny fake brass. I like brass, but I like it when it's darkened, and antiqued and, um, real.

There were a number of stains of unknown origin on the tabletop.

When it arrived I set to giving those stains a shot. I really didn't expect them to budge, since I had no idea what kind of stain I was dealing with nor how many years it had been there. Honestly, I would have been fine with the table with the stains patina too. But I did a little bit of googling (how did anyone DIY anything before Google?) and decided to give hydrogen peroxide a shot.

Instead of using regular hydrogen peroxide that comes in a bottle, I went for the industrial strength stuff. And the only place I knew where to find that was in a box of facial bleach. I bought the extra strength Sally Hansen creme facial bleach (I don't know where the extra strength comes in but it sounded good), pulled out the bottle of powder labeled "Activator" and threw out the rest of the contents of the box.

Then I mixed some of the powder with a small amount of ammonia, as I read in this article. I spread it thinly on all the stained areas, covered them with plastic wrap and sealed them with tape. Then I put it in a sunny window for about 10 hours.

Later, I took off the plastic wrap and tape and washed the whole thing with warm water and a little soap. Because of the size of the table top, I was able to stick the entire thing in the kitchen sink.

There were darker areas where the plastic wrap was, but it was just residual moisture. A day later, they were gone.

But then I went back to the tabletop a few days later and I noticed that now the areas that I had treated were actually lighter than the rest of the table. It was a very, very small difference, and it may have even faded with time, but since I was dealing with a very small piece of marble I figured it would be easy enough to fix (I also could have lived with it the way it was). I just mixed up more of the hydrogen peroxide powder and ammonia and spread it (very thinly this time because I didn't have much) over the entire table, and wrapped the whole thing in plastic wrap. I kind of forgot about it this time, so I would say it sat for about 20 hours, but I washed it the same way I had the first time.

And this time all I saw was a beautiful, white Carrara marble top.

I've delacquered the legs and handle, but that's as far as I've taken it so far. I'm sort of hoping it will get a little rusty or something (I don't really know what I expect to happen, and I'm pretty sure they are made of aluminum as a magnet doesn't stick to them and I know it's not real brass). My intention is to live with it like this for a little, but I'm also considering spray painting the legs an antiqued brass or bronze color. I also put on a coat of marble sealer to prevent future stains.

Despite that shiny gold glaring at me out of the corner of my eye, I'm just loving this table, and even more so now that the marble looks practically new.