Our Farm House Table Saga

Have you ever had a project go horribly wrong and had to come up with a completely new plan? Well, our dining room table project turned out to be a fiasco. A few hours into my "great idea" I was thinking it was my all-time worst idea ever! Fortunately, after a change of plans (and a few more days of eating on the couch than I'd anticipated) we now have a farmhouse table! Now, I have to say that was NOT the original plan.

When we first moved here to Williamsburg our tabletop got quite damaged by the movers. To salvage it I just quickly put a coat of Ballet White over the whole table which covered most of the scratches and dings. Over the years I continued to add coats as needed and finally it was starting to get a pretty lumpy finish. I decided to strip and sand the whole piece down. I figured if the wood was pretty underneath I would just stain it and see how that looked. I figured it might be fun to change things up a bit. And then I figured if it didn't look that great I would just add a fresh coat of Ballet White and that would be that.

I always loved our dining room table. I liked the pedestal base and the oval shape. The only complaint I had about it was that it was a hair too wide for the space which meant we had quite a few run-ins with the chairs sticking out too far. I had pondered looking for a more narrow farmhouse style table but we really didn't need a new table and there are quite a few other things on the list that I would rather be saving up for instead. I looked at some tutorials online but was too scared to actually try to make my own, so pretty much just pushed that thought aside.

Here is a photo of the table that has been there for the past four years. As I mentioned, there was nothing wrong with how it looked, I still love it. You can't really tell in this photo but the top was getting pretty uneven thanks to quite a few coats of paint over the years.

I had stripped a few other pieces in the past few months so figured this one would be just as easy! Not so much...Ugh! It was AWFUL!!!!!

After two days and four rounds of stripping it I threw in the towel. The worst part was the wood underneath was purple toned and patched together so weirdly. At this point because I had taken over the porch where we often eat and moved our table out there we had nowhere to eat for a few nights. I got impatient late the second night and didn't finish sanding because the girls needed to head to bed and my sander is loud, which was another mistake. Once they were in bed I decided to just go ahead and paint it, instead of waiting until the next day to finish properly sanding it. I used the last bit of Revere Pewter I had and well, it really wasn't ready to be painted yet so it didn't turn out that great. I did discover, though, that I loved how the Revere Pewter looked and I really liked how the table looked out on the porch! I looked so much better than the little one we had out there. I started thinking about it and it seemed like such a waste to have spent two days working on a table just to bring it back in not looking that different, but by keeping it out one the porch it seemed new and more fun! So, we decided to keep it out there. I will show you some pictures of it soon. It has been really practical too. We eat out on the porch quite regularly and that table works out there so much better than the small wire one we had out there before. It's not wobbly and we can actually set all of our food on it! =) However, that left us with no dining room table.

I had a few boards leftover in the garage and laid them out and thought it would be pretty easy to make a farmhouse style table top with them but wasn't sure how I was going to make the base. I decided to check out some of the tutorials I had seen and kept coming back to Miss Mustard Seed's. Her table was so beautiful and her directions seemed easy to follow but I was a little scared. I've fixed up some furniture pieces before but never built something from scratch. I figured it would be easier to find an old base and then just attach the top I was making. Well, after hunting on Craigslist for a few days and then spending a day with the girls hunting through all of the antique malls and consignment shops in Williamsburg I gave up. The only things I could find were either way too expensive or not the right size. I headed to Lowe's and purchased some lumber, a drill, screws and four legs and decided to give it a try. After every other step of this project going horribly awry, something finally went right. I can't believe I am writing this, but not only did I get the table built it was FUN! Seriously! I want to make another one! It only took me about an hour and a half to actually build it. And then the following day I spent another hour or two adding the wood filler, sanding and painting the base. It actually isn't completely finished yet. I still need to sand and round the corners a bit so we don't have any injuries seeing how Lola and Lillie fly through this room like crazy little things, and I need to do something to protect the table top. But we finally have a usuable table in here again - yay! And its only 36" wide! Our other table was about 48" so this new one fits so much better in our narrow little dining room!

If any of you have been pondering building one of these I HIGHLY recommend using Miss Mustard Seed's tutorial! I made my top using different boards than hers but followed her instructions pretty much exactly for the base. Now, mine is far from perfect (I split the wood in a few places, and I was doing it by myself and didn't own a clamp so its not 100% aligned), and I learned quite a few things as I was going (like how important it is to make sure you screw all the screws in all the way - kicking myself about that now), but all in all, it is quite rewarding to know that I built it all by myself and even though it is lightweight (I moved it back and forth from the dining room to the porch myself several times while working on it), it is really quite sturdy!

So, even though when I started this project I had no intentions of moving our dining room table out to the porch and building a new table from scratch it's a fun little change! And if I decide this looks a little too rustic for me I can always swap this one and our other one on the porch.

I am still working on finding some chairs or benches to replace the gray chairs that are falling apart but haven't found quite what I am looking for yet.

I hope you all are having a wonderful week!