getting my DIY on...

anyone who knows me knows that i love to be crafty. after a year of living in a teeny tiny little room with not many chances to be crafty, i was itching to get my hands on a new project when we moved back to the US of A. :)

while we lived in the bahamas and i had downtime, i perused many home improvement, DIY blogs. 2 of my favorites are bower power (katie is actually an acquaintance of mine) and younghouselove (gotta love john and sherry!) i actually got the younghouselove book for christmas and it's great - you should check it out if you haven't already (click HERE)
all that to say, when ben and i moved back, i was itching to DIY something of my own. :)

in our new apartment, we have a dining room, but we had no table and no chairs. we started shopping around but didn't find anything we really loved (or if we did it was way out of our budget). one day we went into habitat for humanity re-store and wandered around, and stumbled upon this round table with 2 leaves for only 35 bucks! i looked up at my hubby and said "please! can this be my DIY project??" :) he reminded me how much work was going to go into it, but agreed and we left the store with the table in pieces in the back of our crv!

table in the store:


my idea was to stain it a deeper brown color. even though i've never done something quite like this before, i looked up a few tutorials online (including a very helpful one from younghouselove), went to lowes to get my supplies, and started on one of the leaves for a trial run :) as soon as i began sanding, i realized that it was actually veneer! which made things a bit more tricky as you have to be very careful not to sand through the veneer. i sanded as much as i felt comfortable sanding, and did my first layer of stain. after various tries over about a weeks time, the stain just wasn't cutting it.

supplies:


sanding:


wiping off the stain:


a little hard to see, but the stain just didn't soak in right:



i was afraid to sand it further and ruin the veneer, and after hearing from a friend's husband who had looked at the pictures that i probably shouldn't keep trying to stain it, i decided to go the paint route instead.
i headed back to lowes (i think i went 3 times in 4 days!) :) and the very helpful paint department loaded me up with tinted primer and dark brown paint.

2 layers of primer (zinsser bullseye 1-2-3! it's amazing, covered everything so well!), 2 layers of paint (valspar signature primer+paint = low voc and great coverage as well) and then 2 layers of poly on top to protect it (minswax polycrylic).

primed:


painted:


after the poly, i let it cure for 2 full days before moving it to our apartment and setting it up! i did all of this while ben was away on a business trip and had it all ready in our apartment to surprise him! :)

all set up!


even though it didn't turn out quite like i was hoping, i learned a ton and had fun with it! definitely am eager to keep trying DIY things! in fact, my next post will be about another DIY project i tackled while ben was away! stay tuned!