she’s crafty: the poo brown end table

My husband’s grandmother gives us some awesome stuff. She’s traveled the world and brought back things like masks, shields and spears from various countries, three of which are currently up in our home. She’s also amassed some great stuff from domestic locations, and those things are super cool too.

So when she moved, we received some odds and ends, including an end table. while the structure and details of the table are fantastic, the color was not. It was definitely poo brown.

I decided that I would strip it, since it had been painted that brown color, and spray paint it blue with silver edging and a chalkboard paint topped. I LOVE the way it came out.

Here’s the original end table.

I used Klean Strip spray stripper, which I got at Home Depot, to remove the paint. I probably could have painted over it, but the paint looked thick enough and I didn’t want to add any texture.

A few notes on safety:

• USE GLOVES. I could feel the coldness of the stripper on my hands through the gloves, I can’t imagine what it would feel like on my actual skin. yuck and ow.
• USE A MASK. Seriously, you’re stripping paint with chemicals. You do not want to breathe this in.
• DO IT IN A WELL VENTILATED AREA. I took up a small piece of sidewalk with a folding chair and a cover for the ground so I didn’t make a mess. Noone bothered me.
• SET ASIDE ENOUGH TIME. It took a while to do this, so make sure you have enough time! Rushing through a project like this never turns out well and that’s how injuries happen.

Once I stripped the paint off completely, which took a few applications of stripper since I didn’t wait long enough for it to process the first time, I scraped the gunk off with a plastic scraper. DON’T USE METAL, it can scratch the furniture. Here’s what I used: Putty Knife Set

After that, I sprayed down the whole table with water, being sure to wash off any excess stripper, and let it dry.

I sprayed the whole table with Rust-Oleum Satin Lagoon Ultra Cover 2x Spray Paint. I bought this at Walmart and both the finish and cover were awesome. One relatively thick coat had no transparency. After that dried, I painted the top with Rust-Oleum chalkboard paint and then painted the edges with Martha Stewart Living Metallic Thundercloud Paint.

After everything dried, I also swapped out the drawer knob with the one I picked up at Anthropologie and posted about last Frugal Friday.
Here’s how it turned out!!