Turquoise Coffee Table – Take 2

If you’re a personal friend of mine on Facebook, you’ll know the changes this particular coffee table has gone through. If not, here’s a quick recap!

I purchased this table from a friend and decided I wanted to try something fun...something other than the regular white I normally paint a lot of my furniture.

Before I could start painting though, I had to do a little prep work. The top finish was damaged and I didn’t care for the bottom shelf along the bottom (if you can call it that).

The bottom was quick to fix. It was only held on with 4 screws, so once I’d removed those, the bottom fell off. I sanded the top, added some wood filler to fill in some of the deeper areas, gave it another sand and then covered it in a coat of primer.

I was so excited to start the next step – adding the color!!! I had chosen a soft turquoise (looks more blue in the picture) and couldn’t wait to see how it would look. I painted two coats and loved the soft color.

I could have stopped at that point, but I wanted to try my hand at another technique – glazing. I’ve seen it done so many times in the blog world and thought I’d try it. I added some chocolate glaze, rubbed it off, stepped back and....um, didn’t like it that much. It just looked dull and a bit dirty.

I realize glazing is supposed to make a piece look dirty, but I didn’t like it on this table. I tried to live with it for awhile, but when my husband said he didn’t care for it either, I knew it wasn’t going to work. I tried to sell it, but after a month and not a single request from anyone to see it, I knew this table needed a change.

SO, here is take #2. I thought I would just go with my regular standby of white satin paint. Unfortunately, after the turquoise, the white just looked so bland and boring to me.

I had to come up with something else. I popped into Home Depot and picked up about a dozen paint chips in various shades of cream. I finally settled on the color Linen White. I could hardly believe the difference just one coat of paint made! It was just what the table needed to warm it up a bit. After a second coat of paint, I decided to take it one step further. I decided to add a French Postmark design to the top. After transferring the image using a pencil, I slowly filled in the design with a small paintbrush and some dark brown paint ( I used Bittersweet Chocolate from Behr. Tip – if you don’t need much paint, just buy a sample pot! It was only $5 and will last me a LONG time).

I still plan to give the image a light sand to soften it a bit and then add a clear coat to the entire table to protect the paint, but I’ll wait a week for the paint to completely cure first. I absolutely love this table now. Even my husband was impressed! My plan was to redo the table and list it for sale again, but I think this one will be staying in our living room. ;)

Thanks for stopping by!