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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Vote for Us!

I had no idea, but this blog I follow, Saturday Mornings, is having a contest for March and our new coffee table made the finals!

So vote for us!



And you can vote once a day from now to April Fools Day.  Help us out?  Go down to the bottom of the post and scroll 'til you see "Wheeled Coffee Table (Reef Botanicals)."  That's us!

Is It Still Sawdust If It's From Sanding?

I've probably mentioned that we have expensive taste, Eric and I.  We can't help it.  Show us 100 photos of anything, and without even knowing we're doing it, we'll pick the most expensive one.

And we wanted a new coffee table, preferably one on wheels.

See, last year for Valentine's Day, we bought ourselves a Wii and Wii Fit.  We both really feel like we need to be more in shape, and when it's not walking weather, the Wii is a great way to go.  Plus, it's really fun.  We're both competitive too, so we can easily "encourage" (read:  ridicule) each other to try harder on it.  What we had, though, was a big, heavy octagonal glass coffee table, which is not easy to move.  I had it from before we were married.  In the old place, our living room was formatted differently, and we could work around it.  Not so much in this place, cool as the house may otherwise be.

So... yeah.  Wheeled coffee table.

I did a quick online search, and found this table, at Restoration Hardware.  For about $1,000, with shipping.  Huh.

Well, Eric did a search, and he found this.

That right there is the photo that was posted on eBay, of the exact same sort of factory cart that Restoration Hardware uses.  We went crazy over it, jumping out of our skin to "win" it (or... y'know... win the right to purchase it, since that's what an auction actually is), and we got it for $305!!!

So we took a road trip out to PA and got it into the Jeep.

And then into our driveway.

It was ours!  Mwahahahahaha (can you see me rubbing my hands together like an evil genius here?) hahaha!

Every rusty bit of it!  Doesn't look like much, I know.  But wait.

First order of business... taking the whole thing apart.  Yikes.

Second, getting off as much of the rust as possible, with wire brushes, a wire brush attachment to a drill, and naval jelly.

It was a messy job.

And then we had to prime and paint the iron pieces.

We used an easier method for the nuts and bolts, letting them soak in a bowl of vinegar first.

The wood was in desperate need of sanding.  Scraping too, since it looks like somewhere along the line someone painted it with some thick oil paint.

I love the smell of sawdust (sanddust?), but I think I breathed an awful lot of it in.  That, combined with the advent of spring and the starting of leaf buds on the trees, gave me a very sneezy time of it.

When we turned it over to sand the bottom, we discovered something pretty cool.  Someone had written 7/6/27.  We know that these carts were used to transport large items in factories, like furniture, from about 1900 to the 1930s.  Could it be that this one was built in 1927?

Neat, right?

Anyway, then I stained it.  We chose Ipswich Pine.  We both have an affinity for reddish-toned wood but wanted something fairly light and natural.  It came out darker than we thought it would, but we love it, and it looks great with our other furniture.

We could have sanded it further, or even planed it down smooth, but we really like that it looks so weathered.  It's got history.  And you can't tell from the photo, but if you touch it, the wood is really soft and smooth from all the sanding we did do.

Once it dried, it came inside, and everything went back on.  It took a lot of muscle, so I left it mostly to Eric.

I touched up the flat black enamel paint on the cast iron, and waxed the wood to protect it.  So we went from this...

... to this.

Love!

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