Welcome back to our monthly Thrift Store Challenge! I’m so glad you stopped by to see what my friends and I found this month!
In case you’re new here, every month Emily from Le Cultivateur and I are joined by some of our DIY blogging buddies on a challenge. We have to buy something from a thrift store, yard sale, flea market, Facebook Marketplace or some sort of place like that or find something in someone’s trash pile. Then we take the item and do various and sundry things to make it work in our homes.
Sound like fun?
Come grab a seat by me and let me tell you a little story!
A long, long time ago in a land far, far away there was a glass topped coffee table. It had been painted and distressed and antiqued and was well loved by the woman who bought it and did all these things to it. Alas, one day, one of her many children was doing what nobody should do with a glass topped anything and before anyone knew what was happening the glass was all over the rug, smashed into millions of pieces.
Luckily nobody got hurt but the woman cried because her coffee table was ruined. She thought long and hard about how she could fix it and she looked into getting new glass for it but unfortunately to get beveled glass that was also tempered for safety, would cost more than the woman could afford.
So she thought and she thought about how she could fix it herself and finally she cut some plywood to fit the hole and she filled the edges around the plywood and she sanded it and filled it and sanded it and finally she painted it and she thought she had fixed it so nobody would know and she celebrated.
Then one day another one of her children spilled water on the coffee table and although she is still unsure why, since the table was painted and had varnish on it as well, the water seeped into the crack where it had been filled and sanded and it completely ruined the wood filler so the table looked terrible all over again.
Since the woman knew that her children would likely continue to spill things on her table, she sadly decided that she would need to look for another that had no glass on the top and so she began looking. She looked and she looked for months and finally one day, she found a small oval coffee table on Facebook Marketplace that she thought looked quite cute in spite of its ugly paint color.
Now why this woman’s garage looks identical to mine I’m really not sure but that really doesn’t matter for our story.
First the woman took the table apart since it was sort of wobbly and she cleaned it and made sure it was smooth and then she started painting it.
I believe she used my favorite chalk paint recipe in my favorite white color, White Dove, or at least that’s how the story goes.
Once she had several coats of white chalk paint on the base of the table, she began to put the table back together again making sure it was very strong and secure. After all, she has these children that like to destroy coffee tables!
Next the woman turned the table right side up and she took her heat gun and she started removing the varnish and the stain from the top of the table. Every so often she would put a coat of Citristrip on it and let it sit for an hour or two and then she would scrape it again and she did this over and over until almost all the color was off the top of the table. She had originally thought she would re-stain the table top but once she got it down to the raw wood she found that the wood was so pretty that she couldn’t bring herself to cover that up again and so she decided to just put a clear coat of varnish on it and let the wood shine!
After several coats of polyurethane on the top of the table and on the painted base, she brought it into her home to carefully set it into place.
After it had sat untouched for about a full day and night she decided it would be safe to put some pretty things on the top of it so that it would look lovely in her living room.
(The woman in the story also has a living room that looks eerily like mine.)
Now that we’ve seen what this random woman found and what she did with it this month, let’s go check on what the other ladies found!
Just click on any of the photos below to go to their blog posts. You won’t want to miss a single one!
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Wow Tara thatโs a transformation .. Loving what you have done here.. I love that piece.
Teresa !
Thanks so much, Teresa. I’m really happy with it. It’s quite a bit smaller than my old one and I was worried it wouldn’t be the right scale but I think it looks just fine in the space.
That woman is really lucky to have found such a perfect table. I love it! ๐
Isnโt she? I only wish I was so lucky ๐
[…] outfit for this garden tour!! Tara from Stilettos and Shiplap brings us this DIY post ~ Thrift Store Challenge: Coffee Table Makeover. Love how it turned out! Newcomer Lena from Way 2 Good Life brings us this fun travel post ~ […]
Thanks so much for featuring my coffee table makeover. I really appreciate it.
I absolutely adore this new table!!! It looks perfect in this beautiful space!!! You always work such magic on your pieces! Love it!!!!
You’re so sweet! At first I was worried it was too small to balance the scale of the large sofa it sits in front of but the more I live with it in the space, the more I like it and think it works okay.
Theresa,
You are very lucky the table you bought was wood. I bought an eerily similar table on marketplace that she said was wood (bs) it’s mbf.
Veneer!! I’m going to give it a shot anyway.
๐ Kathlene
Yes I was lucky. I checked it out before I bought it like I always do so at least I knew what I was getting. I gave worked on veneer before though and it can be made look pretty much the same as this one does.