The table that ate my weekend
We’ve talked about buying a new dining table for about… maybe a year. When we had a separate dining room it wasn’t such a big deal because the table was the only furniture in the dining room. Now that we have the swanky open plan living/dining room the table became a problem. It was the only piece with a light wood/paint finish in a room full of dark furniture and bright green walls.

Plus I hated it.

You may notice I’m using the past tense.

We went to a little antique store and the guy was having a sale. He had a walnut table and 5 chairs for about $240. I got him to throw in an extra chair to give us a complete (if somewhat mismatched) set of six. The table and chairs are structurally sound but the table top needed a little love. And the chairs needed to be recovered (they had orange fur seats). Recovering seats on chairs is very easy – you just need a screwdriver, some needle nosed pliers and a staple gun.

Refinishing the table top is less easy – although not as bad as you think. I would just say don’t do it when it is raining, when children or pets or well-meaning husbands are present.

So the table has eaten my weekend. Now it is drying and then I get to sand it again (I’m moving up from 100 to 220 grit!) and then I can get on the first and hopefully last coat of stain.

On the bright side, I sold our old table almost immediately on Craigslist. A nice couple came by on Sunday morning to pick it up about an hour before we picked up our “new” table. So in the end, the table only cost us about $100, a lot of sweat, a few tears, some ruined pants, 11 pairs of rubber gloves, four kinds of sandpaper and a blue streak of swearing.

I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel.