I am in love with it! Here's the process w/ pictures...
So the first thing we did was lay down our drop cloth, and start removing the hardware & doors. After we took the hinges off, we realized that there was a bunch of gluey junk underneath them. We were trying to avoid having to sand anything, but we realized that we had to break out the ol' sander to at least clean the glue off.
And after sanding the spots where the hinges were, we just kept going. We lightly sanded all the exterior surfaces. There wasn't much of a finish on the thing to start with, so we didn't feel like we needed to take it down to bare wood. Plus, we knew we were going to paint it, not stain it, so we just needed to roughen it up a little bit.
Read this little note on the inside shelf while I was sanding. Sorry, friend, but this "softly glowing finish" is going buh-bye!
Once we felt the sanding was adequate, we wiped all the surfaces down with a dry cloth pretty thoroughly to get all the dust off, some of which was from the sander and some was from sitting in someone's basement/Goodwill for who knows how long. Yuck!
And then came the primer! Look at this guy - walking around outside in white socks, no shoes! Sheesh.
After that we did two coats of white paint and then 3 or so coats of clear glossy paint. We tried a few different strategies to clean up the hardware. First, we soaked them in vinegar. Then, we tried 'Varn-X'. And finally, we scrubbed them with 'Brasso'. After 3 failed cleaning solutions, they looked worse than when we started:
So we finally broke down and decided to just paint the hardware as well. We found a textured spray paint called "hammered brown" that fit the look we were going for really well. Here's what they looked liked after being painted:
Aaaand the cost breakdown:
$10 - Table/Cabinet from Goodwill
$6 - Can of KILZ Primer
$5 - Can of Glossy White Spray Paint
$0 - Can of Glossy Clear Spray Paint (already had some)
$6 - Can of Hammered Brown Spray Paint
TOTAL: $27!
Ok, so that's not totally true because we bought some brass cleaning supplies and we also paid someone to drive the table home from Goodwill for us. Really, we spent $51. BUT, had we known what the heck we were doing from the get-go, we would have saved about $25!
Ohh well. I still like it for $51! Here's the finished product again:
Since we found out that we had an accepted offer on our house, I've been going crazy with design magazines and making plans for the different rooms. I've been collecting torn-out-magazine-pages like it's. my. job. And then I've been slowly putting them together into little inspiration collages. Like I said before, I plan to put this table in our dining room and use it to store our good dishes. I also want to make a little picture/art gallery to hang above the table and find some cute little decorative things to keep on top. Here's my design collage (with pretty, white buffet table inserted!):
This being only our second furniture refinishing project ever, I'm pretty dang proud of the outcome!
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