It's Embarrassing

... what our dining set looked like until a week or so ago.  It really is.  It was bad.  It didn't start it off bad.  I'm fairly certain it's circa 1980-something based on the style and the fabric on the chair seats.  I got it from my parents when I moved to my first apartment in 2002; they purchased it for me secondhand.  It was actually in great condition at the time.  Not totally my style as furniture goes, but in my first apartment with a huge, empty eat-in kitchen, "free" and "gift" were very much my style.

Over the years, there was obviously some wear and tear, especially on the fabric.  Most happened in recent years, though, after Eric and I got married.  Having three cats who loved sleeping on the very nubby, very loose-knit fabric created a situation where I didn't want my guests sitting on the chairs, which had become completely interwoven with cat hair.  And then at some point, something spilled on a chair.

And we'd been using the table to make soap and candles, and the overspill of molten soap and essential oils had marred the surface.  Also at some point, someone (*cough* Eric) left something on the table that leaked and caused water damage to the wood.

I grew to hate that dining set.  Despise it.  It made me scowl every time I looked at it.  Scowling isn't a great look for me.  People get intimidated.

So it was long past time to refinish it.  Since both Eric and I pretty much hate painted wood, the natural solution was sand and stain.  Lots of sanding.  Using quite a few belts and even more squares of sandpaper.

Have I mentioned sanding kind of sucks?  Especially when the damned chairs don't come apart and they've got rounded bits and close-together bits and a bunch needs to be done by hand?  It took for-freaking-ever.

Boo for sanding.

On the other hand, yay for staining.  We decided to go with a much more modern and formal "Kona" stain that's not black, but a very, very dark brown, dark as night.

A good coat of polyurethane, and that was done!

In the meantime, at night when I couldn't be outside sanding due to chill and lack of light, I was inside reupholstering.  I've never reupholstered a single thing in my life before!  Had to make new cushions too.  Personally, I think I did a damned good job.  We chose an also formal fabric that we ordered from JoAnn.com.  They didn't carry this particular fabric in store, but did you know you can order a swatch of their online fabrics for $3?  We discovered it while fabric shopping, and it's a stellar idea.  In this particular instance, we discovered that we loved it even more in person than online.

Seats back on the chairs, and all done!  The set was all ready for our Kenucky Derby Party!

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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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