"NEW" Kitchen table!

We have been busy little bees over here lately! Our latest project has been refinishing a kitchen table. I had been wanting a different table for our "breakfast room" or whatever they call it around here, because ours just wasn't fitting very well in our space. The room is very large, mostly long, and our table when collapsed fit fine, but when it was expanded to seat 8, it really didn't fit very well. Our family is growing and we were finding it tight to fit food and plates on when it was small and just our family of five and then we also like to have people over sometimes, so I started brainstorming solutions. We were slightly torn because we also have an empty dining room, but we decided we'd rather have a new kitchen table, because that's what we use all the time. The dining room can wait for another year or so!

SO I started hunting around Craigslist for several weeks. I went and looked at one, and it wasn't what we wanted so we passed on it. We were around that time thinking of just getting a new one from IKEA because it was pretty affordable, but I mentioned to Jeremy that I didn't really love the color choices they had, so what I'd really like would be to find that same table used for half the price and then we could redo it to our liking. Well whaddaya know, a few days later I found just that! I was able to talk the lady down to $250, which I thought was a good deal. The table is 79.5" long at it's SMALLEST, plus it has 2 leaves, so it expands to 115" long! They bought it new and hardly used it, so I kind of felt bad that we were planning on stripping it down when it wasn't in terrible shape, but not that bad.

SO I got it last Tuesday and then went and bought an orbital sander for $30 and got to work. We didn't get any chairs with it either because I wanted to build a bench (I'm very ambitious, I guess, although I originally wanted to just build a table, so I reigned it in) for one of the sides, and then I figured I'd find some chairs somewhere for the rest of the spots. After looking at chairs online, I decided new chairs wouldn't fit in the budget, so I started doing some thrift store shopping. By Thursday I had found four matching chairs at Goodwill for $13.50 each (originally $18; again I talked the lady down - thanks Mom for teaching me how to haggle). So not bad! I sanded them a bit and spray-painted them a fun color. I'm trying to not always just have boring neutral colors in my house, even though my natural inclination for everything is gray, off-white, and more gray. :)

The chairs didn't turn out quite  as awesome as I'd hoped, but they will do.

Okay, now back to the sanding. It was awful. I wasn't using a strong enough grit at first or enough muscle, so Jeremy tackled it for me on Friday and Saturday and did an awesome job. I finished up the terrible spots the sander couldn't reach by hand (never again!) and we started working on the bench. We got the frame done on Saturday and then had to stop to do Halloween, hehe.

 You can see the "naked" table in the background, mostly sanded down to bare wood.

Then we finished it up for our Family Night activity Monday night. It actually was not nearly as hard as we anticipated. We borrowed a Kreg Jig from a friend of ours, which is used for drilling pocket holes, and that really helped to make it look nice. The thing that probably took the longest was cutting the wood because Jeremy just did it with his circular saw (and did a dang good job I might add, he's very precise). If we had invested another $250 in a mitre saw it would have been a lot faster, but that wasn't happening. :) And for the record, this thing is HEAVY! It's not getting knocked over, that's for sure.

So after the kids went to bed, we started testing some stains and I got carried away and just went ahead and stained the whole bench and table! Poor Jeremy, I kept him up too late, but he is a good sport. We used a combo of 3 different stains, 2 I already had from a previous project, and just kind of added a little here and there until we got what we were after. We wanted something a little lighter and something that made it look kind of rustic. A problem I have with IKEA furniture is even when they are solid wood (like this table), they finish and make them look really fake like some of their pressed board stuff. I wanted to see the grains and knots and everything in the wood. We also distressed it a little bit to "add some character" (and help the natural distressing that is SURE to occur with many children blend in).

Tuesday and Wednesday I applied three coats of polycrylic to everything to seal and protect it, and then another two coats to just the top of the bench and table (not legs).  Then on Thursday night, we moved it all inside! We had the missionaries over for dinner, so we were able to use their muscle, and it was great to break it in! Jeremy and I decided when it's just our family we'll probably have to use just one of the ends, because we can't reach across and pass food! It fits great in our room though and we LOVE it!

 It's hard to believe it's the same table!

 And our pride and joy - the bench! I still can't believe we actually made this. It's 65" long, so we can fit lots of kids on it! They loved trying it out last night.

 Oh, and in case you're wondering about the final break down, I don't usually go around telling people how much money I spend, but I'll make an exception for this! The total cost for the table, chairs, and tools and supplies for everything was around $400 and we sold our old set for $200!! (Exactly what we paid for it 6.5 years ago). I was pretty happy with the major upgrade for only $200. Of course we spent a lot of time and work on it, but it was worth it for us. If we have a lot of people over we can also move it into our dining room and it expand it all the way and fit lots of people, which will be fun. So there you go! Whew! We're glad that project is DONE!