Coffee Table Redo-Part3

Our coffee table serves many purposes. It's the place where the kids do homework, make crafts, sometimes eat their dinners. It's also a foot rest, and occasionally used in pillow/blanket forts.

It's used A LOT, and had been showing lots of wear here lately.

This coffee table has gone through a couple of transformations.

To see the actual before, you can go here.

I had not been planning on re-doing the coffee table. It sort of just struck me last Friday that I needed to strip all of the nasty paint off of it. 

This was part two...the center is chalkboard paint. I had found some inspiration on Mrs. Mustard Seed's blog with some chalkboard tables she had created. At the time of the second re-do, my children had a nasty habit of writing on furniture. I came up with what I thought was an ingenious idea to paint chalkboard paint on the top of the coffee table; that way they could have at least one piece of furniture in the house to write on with out mommy fussing.

Well, it's been a few years and the kids are past the graffiti-on-my-furniture phase, thankfully. However, this table has been put through the ringer.

 As you can see there are tons of nicks, and scratches all over the top. There was also this weird film that developed...not exactly sure if it was from the chalkboard paint, or if we're just that nasty.

Regardless, it needed to come off. 

After two coats of paint stripper and a little bit of sanding, I was able to restore the wood to it's natural state.

 I applied the same stain I used for the old bench.

I let the stain sit for 15 minutes before wiping it off. I'm not one for waiting hours to reapply coats of stain to get what I think is basically the same result.

And this is the finished result. A beautiful stained wood top.

A much needed improvement.

I haven't applied the coats of poly yet. We had way too much going on over the weekend to get that done.

I love my big coffee table, and love that it serves so many purposes. Styling it, is an issue all on it's own. Because it has so many jobs, leaving things on it isn't an option.

But, the kids and the hubs are away, so mommy gets to play around with some fun styling:o)

 I love these old Bibles. I think they are so beautiful. The thicker ones belonged to the hubs' grandfather. The smaller one was my mother's cousin's Bible that was given to him when he was fighting in the war. They were to put them in their pocket to figuratively and literally protect their hearts.

Definitely a treasure.

 I can't get enough of these old blue mason jars either.

I have them scatted throughout the whole house. 

I have three more projects that I am in the process of finishing. I can't wait to share them with you all!!