Playroom Table Rehab

Guess What?! We're baaaack!

After a few weeks without my MacBook (and therefore all the data on it) it is now better than ever and ready to deliver so awesome posts. I definitely missed this as an outlet but my total hard drive meltdown did come at kind of ok time since I've had to study for finals and prep finals to give. As of tomorrow I'm officially on break (from 2 out of 3 jobs... research never quits) and I'm really looking forward to it.

We're still working on finishing up the playroom and a local church happened to be completely redoing their daycare and giving away all the old kid furniture. Nate and Will went to check it out and sent me pics of things while I was at work. They came home with some pretty awesome, albeit beat up, things. One of which was this play table and 4 little chairs.

It had definitely seen better day and the veneer on top was definitely not our style but it is solid wood and the perfect Will size.

We've had some issue in the past with trying to take veneer off of furniture only to find that there is particle board underneath. So, we inspected the table pretty carefully before deciding to try and pull it off. Luckily, after a few pieces chipped off, it was clear that the top was also solid wood. Score!

The veneer is held down by some pretty awesome glue and so we picked up a heat gun (I don't know why we didn't already have one... it was only $17) and proceeded to melt the glue and slowly pull up the veneer.

Having the right tool for a job is key to not ending up hurt/swearing and the heat gun was definitely the right tool. It took all of 20 min to completely remove the veneer.

Next perfect tool for the job? Belt sander. After the veneer came off we were still left with a lot of glue residue. Three rounds of sanding (rough, medium, fine sandpaper) with our belt sander completely removed the glue and gave us a smooth clean surface.

I completely wiped the table down (and you can see another project in the back). I swear I also took pictures of the staining process but somewhere in the whole computer failure process I have no idea where they went. So, after I cleaned the table, I stained it. I find getting the wood wet right before staining gives it a better color.

We also decided to trick out the table a bit. Nate drilled two of these holes in the top. I sanded them down, painted the inside and attached buckets underneath to hold legos or eventually crayons and markers. (Once again mysteriously disappearing pictures so I only have this one close up of the process)

With the top of the table in much better shape, it was time to deal with the rest. We decided to paint the chairs and the base of the table a bright fun color (that we already happened to have)

Que perfect tool number 3. We decided to finally get a paint sprayer. I've heard a lot of bad things about different sprayers but I like this one a lot. It's super easy to use, didn't use nearly as much paint as I thought it would, and was easy to clean. It's a Wagner PaintReady Sprayer and it made this next part super easy.

Bam. Wasn't that fast?

In reality, it took two coats (just under one bucket of paint for the sprayer) and about an hour to spray everything (with a break between coats). I was nervous at first because the paint looked a little blobby going on (see the chair below) but it dried perfectly! I did use this mixed into the paint to give better coverage and smoothness.

I flipped the table back over once the paint was dry and handprinted the edge of the table and the inside of the holes. Then I finished the top with a few layers of poly. Then it was time to let it really cure.

I can't wait to show you how our new to us set looks in the playroom!

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