Simple side table re-vamp

We spend a lot of time at the lake over the summer and this past summer was no exception. You know where you can find great thrifts? Lake community garage sales. You heard me right. What do people have in their cabins? Treasures, that’s what. Cheap treasures. Like this side table for example.

$2. That, my friends is a steal. It was beat up and not pretty and I had no idea what I would do with it or where I would put it BUT, I knew I couldn’t leave without it. So I ignored the eye rolls from the bf and loaded it into the back of the truck. When I say load, I mean one handed tossed. It’s pretty lightweight.

I got it home and went right to work. The finish was pretty worn out so all it needed was a quick wipe with a damp cloth to get the dust and dirt off. I chose Kylon’s Ivory spray paint (it’s what I had on hand) in a semi-gloss finish and sprayed the legs down. It took 4-5 light coats of spray paint before it covered nice and even all the way around.

Next was the mesh on top. It was fairly beat up and well, really ugly so it had to go. Hello exacto knife! Once the mesh came off the top popped right out.

I had to clean up the edge a bit as there was a tiny half round that bordered where the panel sat. When I lifted the seam it peeled off fairly easily with only minimal guidance from the exacto knife. The mesh top was what kept the panel in place so I put a bead of carpenters glue along the lip before placing the panel back down on top. Once the glue dried it secured it nicely to the rest of the table. I used some wood filler to fill the seam between the panel and the edge. When it dried I sanded it down to smooth and it was ready for paint!

I have a thing for black chalkboard paint. I love that matte black look. Weird, or no? I eyeballed where I wanted my line to end and masked around the edge with some painters tape then gave the top 3 coats of Rustoleum’s Chalkboard paint.

At this point I thought I had a finished product on my hands. Not so much, it was too blah. I dug through my surplus of craft supplies until I found some Martha Stewart Stencils I had purchased at Wal-Mart ages ago and had yet to put to use. Martha Stewart for the win! I chose to go with the Moroccan pattern and used Martha Stewart’s craft paint in Lake Fog. Totally forgot how time consuming stencilling was – cue waking, cranky, hungry toddler.

I ended up going over the pattern with two coats of paint in order to give it some more depth. I let everything dry out overnight and then gave it a quick swipe with some high grit sand paper to roughen up the look a bit. I sealed the top with Annie Sloan’s soft wax in clear. And BOOM there you are.

Despite the time the stencilling took, I’m crushing on the way it turned out! This project virtually cost me nothing. I already had all my supplies on hand and the table was priced to steal. How can you go wrong with something like that.