Oh Where Oh Where Has My Dining Table Gone?

Before I go into detail, I'm going to put up a few of the progress pictures.  I started sanding the table over the 4th of July weekend.  Here are some before shots and during the sanding phase shots. 

Can you see how nasty the table top was before?  Ew.  Sanding the top seemed to be going relatively well after the first few minutes.  Sweet.  This project might work.  I had to borrow a different tool for the sides, legs, and table lip because a 5 inch sander wasn't going to work so well on a 1 inch rounded lip.  Even I blonde could tell that from the beginning.  That's like trying to fit 10 pounds of shit into a 5 pound bag.  Not.  Gonna.  Happen.  So I started working on the table again this weekend sanding the legs, sides and lip.  (I wonder how many times I can say lip in this post).

Well that tool didn't work out so well for me.  And only because I am so impatient.  It took me longer to sand a 1 inch square than it did the entire top of the table so I decided that I was going to figure out how to use the orbital sander for those pieces as well.  HA.  I'll show you! Famous last words.

Seemed to be working just fine, right?  The picture above this one shows the underneath sides of the table- pretty decorative.  I had to remove the legs (See the horsies?  Awww pretty horsies.) so that I could hold them when sanding.  They have a lot more detail on them so I still had to use the borrowed Dremel for those for all of the groves and cutouts.  But everything looks good, right?  Got the clear coat off, as well as the original stain. 

Well........ that's where the positivity end.  Stupid fucking table.  Ugh. 

You want to know where my dining table has gone?  I’ll give you a hint- that ugly piece of crappola is sitting in the garage waiting to be chopped up into fire wood- that’s where. UGH. I literally spent 3 full days working on that damn thing- sanding, sanding, more sanding, sweating my tittays off and staining my life away- only to have it pull out a gross looking poo color from the dark walnut stain and that’s it. So I have a table that looks like shit- literally. It’s awful. I went through 2 cans of stain trying to get the wood to absorb the rich chocolaty color to no avail. The final coat, I was so damn frustrated with it, I just left on for a leeeeettle bit too long (apparently leaving it on overnight rather than 15 minutes is frowned upon in this establishment!  Love that baby). So now it’s dried onto the top of the table and is beyond sticky and fixable at this point. So I guess I get to build my table after all! BWAAHAHA. Self-sabotage anyone?

These pictures don't do the color justice.  Just believe me when I say that it does NOT look like dark walnut whatsoever.  But you can definitely see where parts of the table took the color, parts did not take it, and where it left a goopy mess.  Hot mess. 

These are just with the first coat of stain.  Definitely not a rich espresso color.  Hmmm.  Let's try another coat or eight, says Miss Positive. 

Same shitty poop color.  UGH.  Ugly.  So now this is what it looks like. 

Now this is where I'm talking about the pictures being deceiving.  Because if this is the color that it came out- I would LOVE LOVE LOVE it.  Like I'd marry it if I could.  But..... this is not the realistic color.  See.....

Yeah.  See how the color absorbed on the lip (again.  Lip.  HAHA.) but it didn't absorb on the top?  Oh and see how tacky and sticky it looks?  Awful.  Bad.  Horrible. 

I guess the good news is that I technically didn’t pay anything for the table. I mean, I did pay money- but having spent only $70 for 6 chairs and the table- I consider the table free. Especially when all of the other sets of chairs that I was looking at were more than $100 for the 6 of them. And the dimensions of this table didn’t really fit the room or what I was looking at having in the space. So now I can build exactly the size, shape and style that I wanted to begin with. Plus this will be a true test of my sawing/hammering/gluing/measuring abilities since everything else I have done project-wise has been completed already and I just made changes to the pieces. Actually building this table from scratch will definitely be an accomplishment if I can actually do it. And not only building it but making sure that when I put a plate on it, it doesn’t fall apart from the weight of it. HAHA. OMG can you imagine? THAT would suck balls.

Here's a preview of kinda sorta where I am going with the table.  Simple farmhouse but square, chocolaty brown and with more detail than a regular farmhouse table.  This is one of the collections that I like from Restoration Hardware (cough cough $2595 cough cough). 

One can dream, right? 

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