As you know, we are working through the living room trying to bring color and life to it. In doing so, I have been looking for ideas everywhere. I have mentioned her before and I will mention her again, and probably many more times, but Jenna Sue is my style. Although she is more beachy, and I want to be more rustic, for the most part everything she does I love and I tweak it to fit our home. I saw her post about a console table she made for her sunroom back in April and thought it was so simple but awesome. I didn’t know where I was going to put it, so I stored it away in my “to be made” file and thought I would eventually get to it.
Notice waaay back there in the corner of the living room behind hubby’s chair there are two metal art work hanging on the wall!??! Well right under that is a iron quilt rack. We have had it since we got married but with babies now it had become a pain in my you-know-what. They push it around the house, bang it into the walls and push it over on top of each other. So my thinker bulb came on, I could put Jenna’s table there.
Supplies I needed:
two 2x10 boards that were eight foot long
three inch decking screws
stain
acrylic paint
water
brushes
sandpaper
caulk
I picked up the two boards on my way home from work, convinced I could do this without hubby’s help. After all, Jenna did! Well, apparently she is more woman than me because I needed hubby’s help after all.
First thing we did was lay out the boards to see where the warps were. I brought the boards home, tied to the top of my car, in the rain. So we knew there would be some damage, but they weren’t took bad.
We kind of “winged” it on this project. I saw Jenna’s picture and wanted it, but I didn’t read her directions until after we were done. You would have though I would have learned my lesson with the Florida String Art, but I didn’t. This wasn’t too bad though. We measured the space to see how big we wanted the table. We settled for three foot tall and four foot long. Went to the garage and began cutting the legs three foot tall. Then we cut the top four foot in length.
Hubby thought it would be easier to pre-drill the holes before we tried lining everything up. I think it really helped.
After we got the screws in the board about half way through, we added wood glue and lined it up.
You want to use a “square” tool to make sure your boards are squared up correctly.
Once we had the legs attached to the top, we measured the distance for the shelf. We knew this would be about three inches shorter than the top because you have to subtract the width of the boards. Although the boards are two inches thick, they are really more like a little over an inch and half thick.
We measured and cut the shelf.
Once we got the entire table laid out, squared away, and level, we screwed that bad boy together. The babies even woke up from their nap just in time to stamp their approval on the masterpiece!
After it was put together, it was time to caulk. I made sure to caulk all of the seams that could be seen.
After the caulk was applied, it had to set two hours. When buying caulk make sure you buy the All Purpose kind that says wood specifically or it will not work. Also, I made sure I got the kind that said “paintable” but it STILL did not paint right.
After the caulk dried it was time to sand. There were screw holes that were rough, not to mention the board was raw so there was a lot of knot wholes that were rough too. I used a low grain (60) sandpaper and went over the entire table.
Then it was time to stain. I already had two different color stains on hand. I went with the darker one because I was anticipating whitewashing it and knew that I wanted the dark undertone before doing the whitewash.
The stain was fairly easy to apply. I didn’t want it to be saturated so I brushed a little and then wiped the excess off with a paper towel.
Up close of the stain.
While I was waiting for the stain to dry, I started making my whitewash. I wasn’t sure exactly how I wanted it to look and I wasn’t really sure how to make the white wash. I started off with a lot of water and a few drops of white acrylic paint.
I mixed the whitewash together and then decided I needed to add some black and make it more gray than white.
After adding some black, it looked a lot better. Then I began whitewashing. I thought about keeping it more watered down that way I add layers if I needed to make it darker.
After the first coat, I thought it looked pretty good.
The stain dried a lot lighter than it went on. After it started drying I decided that it did need a darker coat. I drained the cup to about half of what was in there and added more paint to thicken it up. Once the whitewash was thicker, then I painted another coat. I apologize to anyone that is going to try to recreate this, it really was a do-as-you-go project and I didn’t measure anything on the painting end.
After the second coat of whitewash it was looking better. I didn’t care about making the whitewash even because I planned on sanding it down and making it more rustic/warn, so the more uneven the coats of whitewash were the better.
Little man had to get in on the action too.
I waited about an hour to make sure the whitewash was completely dry then I started sanding.
I sanded it with a fine grain sandpaper, all over. I really focused on the edges because I wanted them really warn.
After I was done sanding it was time for the final step of painting.
I used leftover paint from our bathrooms to paint the back. We originally did not plan on putting a back on the table but the table was not sturdy enough for us and we worried about the babies running around and accidently knocking it over. After putting the back on it, the table was much more stable. Because we didn’t plan on the back, we had to use what we had around the house. We used plywood for the back of the table. Plywood is not easy/fun to paint or stain, because I knew plywood is not high quality wood I knew it would not be pretty to stain and whitewash so I had to paint it. I wanted to paint it with good quality/thick paint. I chose the paint from our bathroom because we bought the most expensive Valspar paint Lowes offered. The paint worked pretty well, but it still didn’t look that great so I put two coats on.
Hubby giving it the approval. It passed!! He liked it. Then it was time to take it inside.
Ta-da! I’m proud of it. This was the first time we have ever built anything from scratch and I think it turned out pretty well. We won’t talk about how frustrated hubby got with me when he asked for the level and I went for my iphone with the level app. He nicely informed me he wanted a real level. But after all the blood, sweat, and tears, ITS DONE and I’m in love with it!
The table plus my flag board plus my new living room color…I’m finally in love with my living room!!! I still have many little décor projects in the making to decorate my new table but those are for another day! Til then, hope yall had a great Monday and have a good week!!
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