I think I have magic powers. Seriously. Whenever I need a piece of furniture, it seems to magically appear right in front of me. I have been on the hunt for a coffee table for a few weeks now, but I was having trouble finding one the right size. Our living room is quite narrow, so I needed something slightly bigger than a bedside table, but smaller than a standard coffee table.
ABBRA-KADABRA!
Someone left this for the taking in the foyer of our building. I know, it’s ugly. But I knew it had potential! Plus I wanted to do some more painting with milk paint.
Someone had previously given it a “makeover” by sticking contact all over it. Awesome. But I could see by the tapered legs, the dark wood and the rounded edges that this was a mid-century piece.
After getting it upstairs into our apartment, I set about removing the contact! It was fairly easy to remove actually, I just found an edge and ripped it off from there.
I was rather confused when I found a SECOND layer of green contact underneath the first one. This was a little more difficult to get off. I ended up using a knife to lift up a corner before pulling it off, but was careful not to scratch the wood underneath.
After removing all the contact, there was some sticky residue left on the table. So I raided my bathroom cabinet and pulled out my nail-polish remover! A quick once over with a nail-polish-drenched paper towel and the table was smooth and glue-free.
Since this was a free find, I wanted to try and not spend a cent on it. So I pulled out some of Miss Mustard Seed’s Milk Paint that I had left over from painting my side table… you can see that transformation here. It was time again to do some painting with milk paint – hoorah!
Initially I thought I would leave the top and the legs paint-free. But after trying that, I thought it looked a bit silly. So I decided to paint the legs.
This looked much better. As is the way with milk paint, you never quite know how much is going to flake off. In this case, not much came off at all. So I used some fine sand-paper and roughed up the edges a tad.
Here is the finished product…
I was so thrilled with the end result! I can’t believe I didn’t spend a cent and scored myself a chic coffee table. Just goes to show, you don’t need money to make a home beautiful.
Penny xo
