Furniture Facelift: Shannon’s Coffee Table

As many of you know I like to upcycle pieces of wood furniture when I can. And I’m going to share my dirty little secret with you all, I purposely drive around on Sundays every so often and look for discarded furniture to remake. Sunday is the day that my neighborhood can put anything they want out on the curb and it will get hauled off to the dump. I think of myself as a knight in shining armor to these poor furniture pieces that have not quite hit their expiration date yet. This became quite a bad habit before I moved into my most recent apartment, and before I knew it my garage looked like an episode of hoarders. But unlike a hoarder I know how to host an amazing garage sale, and anyways long story short this table was one of the pieces I kept.

This was one of those projects you start out and say to yourself, “it’ll take me one, two days–max”. I would have only been so lucky, this was a monster of a project, although I have to say in the end it paid off.

Step by Step:

1. I pulled it off the side of the road and cleaned it off. I just used some orange glow cleaning wipes.

2. I tightened the legs of the table because they were really wobbly, I just used a simple allen wrench

3. Then I sanded it down, make sure you sand down properly or you will have to go back and redo it, I repeat sand it correctly the first time around or you will pay for it later.

4. I planned on hammering in song lyrics into the wood using a wood stamping set that I bought online at harbor freight. Don’t be fooled, this takes a long time, all day to be exact, and it is loud. If you want to do this measure out the space between each line, that way it’s even. I wanted it to look a little less planned so I didn’t worry about the spacing between each letter and each word. I really like the effect it gave the table. Be sure that you take a few practice swings on a scrap of wood first. I chose a song that really makes me happy to put on the table so I chose Incubus – I wish you were here.

5. The next step was to make the words visible on the table so I bought a set of rags from home depot, and some black paint and using my hand I would wipe a bit of black paint over a lyric line and then sweep the majority of it off with the rag. It was messy and I had to do it quickly. It required about 2 coats to ensure all the letters got some black paint in them. Again use your practice piece of wood.

6. My original plan was to hammer in lyrics and then stain the whole table to give an aged look. It was at about this point I began to make my mistakes. I had not sanded properly so when I stained the table the stain came off really uneven.  I abandoned the project for a week or two to gain a little perspective again.

7. When I came back to it, I decided that the top of the table actually looked good, it was just the legs and sides of it that I was really unhappy with. So I did have to sand it again, leaving the top of it and the letters they way they were and decided on painting it brown and blue.

8. I taped off the part of the table I wanted to leave stained with painters tape and then painted the rest a dark brown.

9. After I let the brown coat dry I painted a blue/turquoise over it.

10. I hand sanded parts of the turquoise off to let the brown show through.

11. To finish it all off I sprayed a coat of poly-shine on it to seal everything in, you may want to do a couple of coats.