DIY: Rustic Coffee Table and TV Stand Makeover

Hey guys,

Long time no chat!  Sorry for the unplanned hiatus - the end of the year is always a crazy-busy time with Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years...so now that the holidays are out of the way I can try to get back on track with blogging.  Though I have to admit there was one more culprit that distracted me from crafting posts: I finally discovered Instagram.  Seriously I had no idea what I was missing!  For a slacker like me, Instagram is a lazy-girls dream.  Instead of spending hours writing up explanations and laying out posts, I could now post photos with small descriptions in a matter of minutes.  Super awesome, but also super distracting.  Whoops.  While Instagram is a great tool to share my projects and DIY's with a different audience, I still like having detailed records of what we've been up to, which is why I'm trying to switch gears and get back into the blogging world.

Soooo back to the house!

In one of my last posts I shared our upstairs living room makeover.  One of the many changes we made to this room was repainting our coffee table and TV stand.  These two pieces of furniture had definitely seen better days - I bought them from a couple off Craigslist about five years ago and they're made mostly of particle board so they were definitely in need of some TLC.

I took both pieces out to the garage and primed them with Gripper water-based primer followed by two coats of Behr paint.  I didn't paint the tops of either piece because we had decided to attach some wood boards to the top instead for some visual interest.

After picking up our boards at Menard's we cut them to the needed length for both tables.  Then I got to staining!  I decided to try the vinegar steel wool method since many people on Pinterest were able to achieve a nice weathered gray look with it.  After experimenting with a few different mixtures (one with coffee grounds, another with black tea) I settled on the black tea concoction since the test board had the color I was looking for.  I set to work painting each board with the vinegar/steel wool/tea combo using a foam brush.

While the color looked perfect during the initial application, I was disappointed to discover that once the stain dried it turned an orangey color.  I thought maybe if I tried another layer of stain it would help, but just like the first layer it eventually turned orange as well.  Such a bummer!  Since I didn't want to hold this project up I decided to continue on with attaching them to the tables, but I'm hoping at some point to play around with re-staining them a darker color to get rid of this 90's-looking hue.

After the boards were completely dry we started attaching them to the tables board-by-board using wood glue.

To make sure that the boards wouldn't pop up or shift while drying we used these small clamps to keep them in place.  Worked like a charm!  Before long our table tops looked like this:

The inconsistencies in color were my favorite part, but other than that I doubt I'll be using the vinegar-steel wool method in the future.

After a bit of distressing and some new hardware our TV stand and coffee table looked like this:

Even though I'm not super happy about the color of the wood tops, I really do love the overall look of this transformation and am crossing my fingers that both pieces hold up for a few more years until we can afford something of higher quality.  For now, we can check these off the list!

Thanks for reading!