Lil' $5.00 Table

One day while I was out thrifting, I came across this table....for 5 buckaroos.  We needed a table for our deck since our half wine barrel table fell apart.  This table wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but for such a reasonable price, I couldn't pass it up.  I liked that the legs of the table had character, but I knew I had to do something about the veneer top.

 The first thing I did was sand the top down.  I wasn't trying to get rid of all of the veneer, but I wanted to sand it down to roughen it up so that spray paint would stick to it.  I used an electric orbital sander.  Once I had it all prepped, I painted it like this to match our then newly painted patio table, which has now been repainted.  Here is what the table looked like after the first paint job.

 

We left the table like this for a couple of weeks before I decided to spray paint the top...again!  The blue was just...well, too blue, so I went with something more neutral the second time around.

More neutral compared to the blue?  Yes.  Was I happy with the color? No.  As the saying goes, "Third time's a charm."  Oh, and if you look super close at the bottom of the front right leg you can see that the paint started chipping off.  Blast!  I had to repaint the legs too.  What happened was that the legs got wet, the wood expanded and caused the paint to chip.  On to paint job #3, with a color change...again!

First, I had to sand the bottom of all of the legs so that the paint would stick better.

 And here she is.  Ahhhhh, much better!  I went with a dark walnut color for the legs and a colonial red for the top.  I felt that if I painted the entire table brown, it would be too brown, with the color of the chairs and all.  All I have to do now is find some plastic discs to nail into the bottom of the legs.  They will raise the table up off the deck so that it won't get wet as easily. 

 

And let me remind you how the other side of our deck looks.  It all goes well together now.