A place to rest my stuff…

I saw this little table at Salvation Army a couple of months ago. It was already black (my fave. Yay!), and had some cute styling to it. It weighed only a couple of pounds and fit in my shopping basket nicely. I think it was less than $10.00. It was, however, chipped and scratched, but I immediately thought about using it outdoors, so what did it matter?

I finally got around to sanding it and repainting it. Since it was going outside, I used Rustoelum outdoor paint. Then I covered it in a couple of coats of polycrilic. Now the best way to apply polycrilic in order to not leave brush strokes or bubbles, is to put on a latex glove, hold onto a piece of sponge, and pull a cotton sock over it. It is way easier to paint detail and rounded things. I’ll definitely be doing this when it comes time to paint my staircase.

As it would be outside, I suspended the table and dipped each foot in polycrylic.

Here’s the finished table:

But I worried. It was going outside. So I grabbed some clear peel&stick protective plastic and applied that. Yikes! Well, I wasn’t careful and it ended up full of air bubbles. When I tried to smooth them out, the plastic scratched. It looked awful.

But I had some puffy plastic shelf liner I liked, so I glued that down. I don’t love it, but I’m afraid it I remove it, it’ll tear off the protective plastic, the paint and the veneer, and I’ll have to start again. Which I just might.

But in the meantime, here’s the little table by my front door. I can put my stuff down on it while I hunt for my keys. A future project is to paint the front door red and the side windows black. But for now, this is quite handy.

EDITED TO ADD: I wasn’t at all happy with the way it turned out. When a friend on Facebook mentioned it looked a little like tile, I got a brainstorm. What if I just glued some leftover tile to the top?

The glue under the black and white shelf liner was still wet, so I just washed it off both the shelf liner and the table top.

I had a few tiles left over from doing the mudroom in my previous home. They were one of the last things I decided to haul from Toronto, but now I’m glad I did.

Voila!

Much better, eh?