DIY; refurbished wooden coffee table.
Total Cost: $42.00 Total Time: 3.5 hours (not including drying times, but including the time it took me to shop for the supplies as well)
I got this table for free from my grandma. It’s a pretty solid piece of furniture and it’s the PERFECT size for my livingroom. It needed to be refinished anyways, but I decided that I wanted to completely refurbish it. Now I know there are people who think it’s a cardinal sin to paint solid pieces of wood furniture, but I’m not one of of those people, and if you are, this post might not be for you. Warning(S): You should do this project, or any project where there will be paint fumes, in an open and well ventilated area. I also recommend using some sort of face mask. I live in Florida, and I did this project during Hurricane Season in a garage- this means it’s super rainy and super humid- so I made sure to keep the garage door and the back window open, I propped a fan in the window and faced it outwards to help suck out the fumes, and I (and everyone else) wore a mask the ENTIRE time. Who cares if you look silly? It’s better to be safe than sorry. Step 1: Sand, baby, sand We used 100 grit sandpaper from Ace Hardware and a palm sander I borrowed from my dad to get the remaining finish off. The top was pretty easy, with the sander, and took about 10 minutes. The rest of the table, however, took about 45 minutes- and without Josh and Adam’s help, this probably would have taken at least double that time. This table has a lot of small details and crevices that I didn’t pay much attention to before I started this project. Step 2: DUST! We used a brush to get most of the excess off, then used a shop vac on the blow setting to get even more off, then brushed it again. It’s important you get all of the dust off so, from what I have read, the paint sticks correctly and leaves a smooth finish.
Step 3: Paint
It took 2.5 cans of white spray paint, a miniscule amount of sunshine yellow wood-friendly paint (that I don’t have a photo of- sorry), and 1 can of topcoat total. The white spray paint actually has a tip that lets you adjust it to have a flat spray, letting you get a more even and wide distribution. These are only $1.00 more and COMPLETELY worth it in my opinion. The first coat of white spray paint took about 10 minutes. We let it dry overnight. The next morning I came back and put the second coat of white paint on it, ran errands for about two hours, and then did the second coat. Another two hours went by and I did the third coat and let that sit for about an hour before I came back and did the little yellow flower etchings on the sides. I used a small detail brush from the paint section (about the brush: I went with a mid-priced/quality brush for this. Even though I was only going to be able to use this brush for this one project, going with the cheapest one was likely to leave bristles in my project). This part took the longest. There were 8 of them total, and I listened to about 1.5 episodes of NCIS on Netflix before I finally finished. Finally, two hours later, I did the top coat. That takes about 10 minutes, as per the can’s instructions, to dry. So I did a second coat after that. Then, because I live in the Land of Humidity, I let it sit in the garage for 3 days to make sure everything was completely dry. I think it turned out pretty well- especially for my first project.