Side Table

Most of my furniture is stuff I've picked up secondhand, and my living room side table is no exception. I got it for $30 at the local junior guild resale store, which has some really good stuff. They had a beautiful mission side table that I was coveting, but at $70 I had to pass.

But I love this table. It is some heavy-duty wood and I actually like the color a lot. The original pulls were these strangely shaped loops, so I replaced them with a couple of knobs from Anthropologie. But that's all I had to do to make this one presentable... not too shabby.

Cabinet Facelift

It was my sister's birthday on Friday, and I wanted to get her something good. She just bought her first house a few months ago, and she mentioned wanting something by her back door to hold her pool towels. Enter me and a thrift store.


I went down to the St. Vincent de Paul in Dallas and found a cute little cabinet that was in pretty good shape:

 

The color needed help, it had a lot of dings and scratches, the hardware was 1)gold and 2)rusty, and there were a couple of cracks in the top, but nothing that couldn't be fixed without too much trouble. It did have these beautiful dovetail joints in the top, and was solid wood, so worth the $30 I paid. Normally I would just paint something like this and be done with it, but the wood and joinery was too beautiful to cover up.

The first thing I did was fill in the cracks in the top with a wood filler putty:

The next step was the worst... stripping. I wanted to restain the cabinet, and for the new stain to take hold it was necessary to get as much of the old stain off as possible. Enter Klean Strip. I took the door and hinges off the cabinet and stripped one side at a time.

Stripper goooooooooooooop. Note: do not get this stuff on your skin, ESPECIALLY your face.

The stripper is effective, but really messy and gross and will burn if it gets on you. After everything was stripped, the cabinet had to dry overnight.

The next step was sanding, which is always a pain but a necessary evil. After sanding was the fun part, the stain! Here's a before-and-after of the cabinet body:

Big difference, huh! The final step was spraypainting the hardware. I was not digging the rusty gold situation and I knew my sister would not approve either, so it was Rustoleum to the rescue! The knob and faux keyhole on the front of the cabinet door couldn't be removed without an excess of effort on my part, so I carefully taped all around them and covered the door with newspaper before spraying:

 

By the time I was done, I wished I were keeping the cabinet! It was so cute and frankly I think it turned out awesome. I see a lot more thrift store rehabs in my future...

Final before and after!