tables Archives - Revive. Refresh. Restore. Lakeside Restoration

Beachy FUN!

April 28, 2017October 6, 2019Posted in Furniture, FusionTagged beachy, coastal, coral, furniture store, midnight blue, nautical, painted furniture, reverse stencil, side tables, stencil, tables, upcycle1 Comment

Maybe it’s because it’s been a LONG winter in Upstate NY; or perhaps it’s because our family just returned from visiting the beach in Florida; maybe it even has something to do with the obsession I have had with painting furniture either black or white or black or off-white…But I felt the need for some Cheesy Fun Furniture!I busted out of my rut by jumping into some FUSION Midnight Blue (OK, not so different from Coal Black, but it’s a start!) and a little reverse stencil staining on top of this great (heavy) oak side table.

I started by cutting the shape of an anchor out of contact paper and placing it on the previous finish. Then, I used a darker stain to cover the surface. Once dried, I peeled off the contact paper and gently sanded to bring the surface level.

That was fun!

I tried a similar technique on the whale and waves after painting the table legs….you guessed it – Little Whale Blue from the Tones for Tots FUSION line. However I preferred not to bring the tabletop much darker and it wasn’t a strong image, so I ended up covering that with a traditional stencil and washing it with Homestead House’s Driftwood stain & finishing oil. I think it’s just Cute!

But that’s not all…then I went totally off the wall and made this:

Yes, that is FUSION’s Coral stenciled with a picture of coral in metallic brushed steel. It’s just so bright and FUN – you can’t help but smile when you look at it!

Ahhh, so that has been my beachy, nautical adventure in painting this week. I hope it also brings smiles to many other faces! What fun color or technique do you want to try on a piece but haven’t because you convince yourself it’s too silly? I say Go For It – it’s just paint and wood – what real harm can it do? …and it might just turn out Beautiful!

French Provincial Update

April 18, 2017October 6, 2019Posted in before and after, French Provincial, FurnitureTagged before and after, french, marble, marble side tables, painted furniture, provincial, rose marble, side tables, tables, vintage, vintage marbleLeave a comment

Yellow, gold and pink. I’m not sure the “before” pics provide the full experience of 60 year-old, dingy, gunk-in-the crevices state of this furniture. The streaky yellowed color resembled the tar on the walls of a smoking room. While the rose marble was really beautiful (and flawless), sitting atop the yellow and gold bases made it appear rather tacky and crass at first sight.

We received a house-full of french provincial furniture from the original owners who purchased it new as newlyweds. This has provided an almost endless supply of projects – many of which will be documented here in future posts.

I was very nervous about having slabs of marble
lying around the garage – it’s too expensive and too permanently breakable for me. So, the marble topped tables were
clearly the first candidates for repair and restoration.

The repairs were pretty straightforward and included filling a few gouges, gluing a loose joint here and there and adding some structural support screws.

After scrubbing with TSP substitute (twice), it seemed the toughest part was finding the right shade of creamy white to show off the rose marble while subtly highlighting the french details of the pieces. After many tries, I settled on the perfect hue. As you can see here, flipping a detailed piece upside down to access all of the crevices is the most effective way to ensure a thorough paint job; (and I can throw in a load of laundry while coats are drying!). A thorough sanding of all surfaces, including the patches, a few coats of paint with light sanding in between, and a final coat of polycrylic for durability (and easy future cleaning!) and this set was ready for it’s new home.

I love how the carved wood details subtly show off the distinctive lines of the pieces without having to use the previously overdone gold highlights.

What color would you have chosen? Would you have used an accent color to highlight the trim details?

This Table Has Legs (6 of them) & She Knows How to Use Them

March 15, 2017December 27, 2019Posted in before and after, French Provincial, Furniture, FusionTagged before and after, Champlain, dining set, french, new store, painted furniture, provincial, restore, tables, upcycle, vintageLeave a comment

After working on several of these provincial pieces, I find I really love the lines of these legs. I lament the size and shape of our dining area as it just won’t accommodate this set. Here is a photo of how battered and beaten these legs were and how nicely they cleaned up after a bit of scrubbing, filling, sanding and painting (& sanding & painting: repeat…). This table has 6 gorgeous legs .

In addition to her battle scars, the overall color of this set was also frightening. The yellowed, worn, faux finish with chipped gold trim was not exactly appetizing.I was initially planning on lightly sanding and re-painting the whole thing. I’m not sure what made me curious to experiment on the table leaf…perhaps it was the factory marking on the bottom of it indicating “Cherry” in barely legible scrawl.

Could this tabletop possibly be cherry wood hidden under a thick, impenetrable layer of paint and wax and what can only be described as funk? Only one way to find out…Citristrip on the leaf.

And This is what I discovered!

Not exactly blemish-free, but too beautiful to be covered in a faux-wood paint finish.

So, this is what I did.

Yes, that’s my living room with multiple furniture refinishing projects in various stages of incompleteness in the middle of it. Before judging me, please understand…It’s Winter in Western NY. The unheated 1-car garage is filled with pending project furniture and averages about 15 degrees. The yard alternates between deep snow and semi-frozen mud this time of year, so there was no place to sand the table top. Thank goodness Citristrip can be used indoors because the goopy, gloppy mess ended up getting stripped in my living room. Who can wait for Spring when you know there’s painted cherry wood yearning to be free?

So if you look carefully in this photo of my progress preconditioning the wood in preparation for staining, you will see that I am totally busted. Citristrip and mineral spirits only got me so far and I needed to sand the table top to address a few particularly difficult areas. Yes, I power-sanded in my living room. In my defense, it was midnight and it didn’t seem to make that much of a mess. Until the morning sun shone brightly through those big windows, illuminating the thick layer of dust everywhere. I quickly regretted my nocturnal activity. And I cleaned. A lot. Please folks, Don’t do this at home in the house.

But it does look pretty good, doesn’t it?

The next morning, in addition to realizing how silly it is to sand in the living room, I also noted that after conditioning, the wood was less than perfect. Nothing that a few layers of stain couldn’t manage, but it was clear I would have to go with a darker shade than I originally planned. This became especially relevant when the edges took the stain much differently than the top. It took some creativity, but I was able to make it work.

With the time needed to dry between layers of stain and polycrylic on the top, I was able to patch, sand and paint the base and 6 chairs. A few of the chairs needed gluing and general tightening up, but this is a great set of quality furniture and it is SOLID. The seat covering is pretty new, in great shape and professionally done, so I decided to leave it in place. Better for the next owner to select something specifically suited to their taste than to mine. (Although I do have a bolt of gorgeous blue-patterned upholstery I purchased just for these seats – before I realized they wouldn’t fit in my space…). Oh well…

Since I was obviously working indoors, I chose a paint with no fumes or VOCs. Fusion Mineral Paint is the most eco-friendly paint I have found. It is pure acrylic, sticks to just about anything, and doesn’t require a topcoat for tough-as-nails durability. By the way – I despise waxing furniture, so not requiring a topcoat is a Huge plus for me. The color I chose for this set is Champlain, an off-white neutral in a creamy tone. I sanded between coats for extra smoothness and ended up using a quick swipe of wipe-on poly just to make sure it would be easy to clean in the future – it is a dining table after all – and I know what my tables endure so I expect no less from anyone else.

Just look at all of those great legs!!!!!

I wish I had a better space to properly stage this in, but it really is a gorgeous set that I think speaks for itself despite the lack of staging. What colors would you have chosen? How would you stage this set?

Orange Dining Table and Chairs

January 3, 2017October 6, 2019Posted in before and after, FurnitureTagged before and after, dining set, furniture store, gel stain, painted furniture, tables, upcycle, uphostery, vintageLeave a comment

Imagine orange velour. Not bright, cheery, fun orange… I mean stained, dirty, aged orange velour. That is exactly what I had scored with this dining set.

In fact, even the table finish had a bit of an orange hue that developed with its age.

And it gets better – if you look closely, you can see the dated diamond pattern in the table top.

The look on my spouse’s face clearly questioned what (perhaps if) I was thinking.

What I was thinking is that this was a solid wood dining set with two captain chairs and I was getting it for a ridiculously low price as an estate sale leftover. I needed furniture to practice on so low cost was key. What’s the worst that could happen?

First up – what to do about the caning.

Most of the caning was in perfect shape, except for a small hole in one chair back. After researching, I had no desire to to repair the caning – not necessarily because it looked difficult (it does) rather because I decided I didn’t love the look of caned chair backs. Besides, they leave those little annoying patterns on your back if you sit in them for a while…

No question I would be recovering the seats, so I also decided to pad and upholster the cane. After painting the chairs, of course.

Paint & Stain

Since farmhouse tables seem to be the trend, I went with painting the chairs and table base a creamy white. I’m not a fan of the distressed look, so after cleaning with TSP substitute, sanding and priming, I painted with a solid white.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo, but my first attempt at upholstering the chairs with the gorgeous cream linen (bought on sale) looked very nice. In fact, too nice – it made the chairs look way too formal for the farmhouse style I was going for. So, I went back to the fabric store and picked a different fabric. After batting and upholstering the chair backs and cushions, here is how they came out on the second try.

I really wanted to have the stained wood table-top look, however, remember the criss-cross diamond pattern? Yuck. While I had never used a gel-stain (which is effectively a tinted polyurethane that sits on top of the existing finish) this seemed like a good time to try it. Using a large, wide brush, I applied several layers of deep brown in one direction across the width of the table. This darkened enough to hide the criss-cross while making a texture that resembled the depth of wood grain.

On this project, I learned a few things along the way about how much space it takes to comfortably refinish a table and all of those chairs (answer: more than I have in my home/garage). I also became pretty proficient with a pneumatic stapler by the end of the project. Overall it was a great learning experience and confidence-builder for me and this dining set will get a new life now that it has been updated.