Dining Room Table

Alright! The table is finally making it's way on here! We started this project in the first week of May, and have finished the brunt of it, we still need to distress the bench but honestly I don't even care about that right now! I am so thankful that I can eat dinner at a table! This past Sunday we had my brother, parents, and grandparents over for a Father's Day lunch. I cannot tell you how nice it was to have a big table where everyone can stay after the meal to just sit around and talk! 

This table started out as more of a challenge than we thought. We got the table from a lady, Lori, in our church who found it at Goodwill. She was the biggest help ever! She does this all the time, she either refinishes furniture or she'll paint custom pieces for people. This would have been bad without her!

The Long Road To A Dining Room Table: We brought the table over to our house and set it up in the dining room with the cardboard so we wouldn't have to worry about weather, we thought this project would only take a couple days. Lori came over with primer and paint, we started putting the primer on, but soon realized it wasn't sticking. . . so out came the KILZ. That stuff is intense I'm still not sure what it does, I think it's used when you're painting on a smooth surface and need your paint to stick. After KILZ I put a dark gray primer, then I grab the paint can that I thought Lori brought me. . . wrong! It turns out we had a can of the exact paint that we had used on our cabinets, but ours was oil based, and hers was acrylic. Now I had no earthly idea that would make a difference, so I probably would've used it even if I had seen the one word difference on the paint can. Man was I in for a surprise! FYI once you use oil based paint, you can't use acrylic anything over top of it! What probably made it worse is that we think after I had let a couple coats dry over night, I came back and did a couple layers in acrylic. This was obviously not the finest moment in my extensive furniture painting career! (read that in a sarcastic voice!) I came back and kept thinking "wow this looks terrible, it's a good thing we're distressing it!" So Lori comes over for my distressing lesson, and realizes she should have never left me alone with this table! To make an already long story mildly shorter, we ended up having to sand off the entire top of the table, and paint with only oil-based, which requires 24 hours to dry between each coat. Then we were able to finally distress and antique it! I also used a wax on the top of the table to protect it from spills in the future!

The only before picture I have. Ignore the mess! You can see that it was already a cream, and very dirty!

This is it painted completely white after we had to sand off the paint job I had already done!

I'll be sharing the specifics about the chairs tomorrow! 

Forgive the morning light, we got 4 chairs to go with the table, and Aaron built a bench for me. 

Here is a close up of the distressing we did. We used an electric sander, and then put a very little bit of brown antique glaze. 

Zeke photo bombed while I was taking pictures of the table legs!