New Dinning Room Table Refinished

I’ve been wanting a new bigger dinning room table for a while now, but I never got around to dealing with it. Since everything else is being moved around I finally decided to swap tables. I had an outdoor iron table that my mother had painted and gold leafed. The problem was it wasn’t very big, so I wanted to swap it for a wooden table sitting in my grandparents storeroom.

Isis didn't want to part
with the old table. 

Its not a great picture, but the poor table
should not be remembered this way. 

            

The table had been through a lot. It started as a pine dinning table, then the legs were cut off to make a coffee table, then new wood was added to the legs to make it a dinning table again and it was painted distressed white. I wanted it to be pine again and I thought it would be easy since the paint was already peeling off. I should have known it wouldn’t be as easy as I thought.

         

As I started peeling the paint off I realized two things. First, the reason the paint came off so easily was because the table had such a thick layer of wax on it. And secondly because of the layers of wax and childhood drawings by me the tabletop was nasty and terrible looking. Now I would have to strip the tabletop and refinish it.

Once the top was pealed off I started on the legs. I quickly peeled the paint off the original part of the legs, remember how I said wood had been added to the legs? Yep, the paint stuck there. I tried sanding it and it didn’t want to come off.

(I thought it looked like the table was wearing socks, but then my mother said it looked like a Clydesdale. Now every time I look at it I think about horses.)

 I stood back and reevaluated the plan for the table. The new plan was to continue peeling off the peeling paint, then repaint the legs white. Also I would remove wax from the top and keep the top natural pine.

Top is years of wax build up, bottom is freshly cleaned wood. 

Removing the wax buildup was grueling but worth it when I saw the natural pine. (The photos do not show the difference as pronounced as it really was)            

After cleaning and a fresh coat of wax, now its such a beautiful color. 

While I did not enjoy how much more work went into the table than I planned, I love my new table!