Sewing Table Revamp

When moving to the new house, Eric and I vowed to organize things differently so they'd make life easier.  It's good to start with a clean slate for something like this.  Reorganizing everything in the same space is much different and more difficult than doing it while moving to a new house, especially one with a better setup for us.  The old place is a one bedroom with a tiny, skinny office.  The new place is two bedrooms plus an office sizeable enough to also be a sewing and craft room.

And yes, I said sewing... I've gotten so into this idea of my sewing machine!

Well, Eric has had this sewing table for so long that he doesn't even remember where he got it... he may have seen it on a street corner in Brooklyn and absorbed into his apartment, or he may have gotten it on Craigslist, like much of his other premarital furniture.  Maybe he bought it at a stoop sale (the Brooklyn version of a garage sale).

All we know is that it's old, and was a little worse for wear.

We had a garage sale a few weeks ago, and actually tried to sell it, with no takers.  It was after that sale that my sister and brother-in-law surprised me with my kickin' sewing machine.

Aha!  Sewing machine... sewing table... hmm...

And Eric's got a sander.  So we went to Lowe's and I picked out a nice Red Oak all-in-one wood stain.  I figured an all-in-one would be good for this project, since it's an indoor piece that wouldn't really be getting wet for any reason I could fathom.

And then Eric sanded the table with his orbital sander.

And sanded...

And sanded... That was some serious varnish on that sucker!  We went through 14 disks of sandpaper getting it off!

I helped too, of course.

Then I went to work with handheld sandpaper to get the finer bits, like near the seams.

Eric went over it again with the orbital sander with a find sandpaper to smooth it out, while Meg inspected his work.

And I stained it!

It was finished pretty quickly, at least the parts I could get to without turning it over.  The rest I had to save for the next day, and then I gave the outside a second coat to make it a redder finish and more shiny.  Really pretty!  My biggest peeve was that it started raining every day and I'd done this in the garage, so the stain took forever to dry and stop being tacky before I could bring it on over to the new house.

But it finally found its new home!

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