I’m going to warn you right now, up front: This is not a story of success. It is not a story of “wow, that was so easy!”. It is definitely a failure. But it’s proof that things don’t always go as well as we hoped. So with that said …
Making such a huge amount of progress in the kitchen gave us a major confidence boost. Not only did we feel like we could tackle these projects, but we realized that we enjoyed doing it, and we definitely enjoyed the results. So we’re on a roll.
One thing that I’ve wanted to do for a while is something, anything, about our hand-me-down dining room table. It came as part of a set from my late grandmother, all of which are an ugly, “speckled orange” color. It’s solidly built, and I definitely don’t want to toss it. But I don’t know the first thing about refinishing furniture. I thought about painting it (which is how I “dealt” with the matching buffets), but I wanted a natural wood finish. During one of my many just-browsing-the-internet moments at work (on my lunch break, of course. Never during work hours!), I noticed this table at Restoration Hardware:
Image from Restoration Hardware
It has a very similar shape & lines to my dining room table, so I thought “Hmm, this is probably what my table would look like if I stripped it!”. I had a vague memory of what the table looks like (as I hadn’t seen it in a while — it’s buried under displaced objects from our kitchen renovation), but I was certain if I stripped the finish and stain, I’d be left with a table like this one.
So on my way home, I stopped to get some eco-friendly stripper (Soy Gel Paint Remover). Then as soon as I got home, I uncovered the dining table, and started putting stripper all over it. But as I was doing it, I noticed the grain.
Here is my internal monologue as I was applying the stripper to the surface
“Hmm…. that’s not what I thought it would be”
“It’s got these curly patterns in it”
“Wait, is that maple?”
“There is no way this entire dining table is made out of quilted maple. That’s too fancy”
But even though I was feeling uneasy, I persevered with the application. It was only while Alex and I were out and about later, while the stripper was working, that the nebulous worry finally formed into a conclusion. The table must have a veneer. I didn’t know how that would affect my plans, but I knew things weren’t looking good.
So after the stripper had worked for a few hours (and in another situation, where I wasn’t sure of failure, I would have let it sit longer to work more), we started using our scrapers and wire brushes to remove the gel. Sure enough, the tabletop was definitely a veneer. A fairly thick one, but still a veneer. Plus, by checking out the unfinished wood on the bottom of the table (which we should have done before attempting anything), it was clear that no matter what we did, we would never get to the light Restoration-Hardware color we were looking for. The wood was always going to be orange. (although that gives me an idea… can I bleach it? I will google this …)
You can see the pizza-slice-shaped pieces of veneer on the rounded ends. Not what we were hoping for.
We were dejected and annoyed. Plus, we had a jacked-up looking table (we’re still going to try to rehabilitate it, but that will take another, more thorough application of stripper, and either re-staining it or painting it, so we’ve got some work ahead of us). And in 2 weeks, we have 7 people coming for a pre-Thanksgiving celebration, so we need a table ASAP.
And so, because of this botched attempt at refinishing, and our need for a table soon, we decided to build our own dining room table.
{ kelley + alex } 