DIY Kitchen Table

This weekend my husband is studying for exams, so I came up with a few projects to keep me busy while he was studying. 

We have a breakfast nook, but in the three and a half years we have been in our home, we have never used it as such.  It has become the mudroom, where we throw our keys, our bags, our coats.  It is where we keep our receipts, and often used over the counter allergy medications as well as our darts, and our two tier food tray that is too large for our countertops.  It has become a very busy, messy space.  My project was really to transform that space.  I will show the whole project soon, but today I will tell you about the bigger project in that room.

One piece of that puzzle, and the focus of this post, was my old kitchen table - the place where most things were collecting.

This table has been a dining room table, a living space desk, and finally a place where all things in our kitchen collected.  because it was so full of STUFF all the time, you really couldn't see how bad of shape it was in.  I got this from Target about 8 years ago,  maybe more.  It's just a wood laminate table, that every time you put something wet on it, it bubbled the finish, until it ended up looking like this.

So I decided to make this table look a whole lot better, so that it would help to serve a better purpose for our new "mud room and more" look.

First I sanded and wiped it down with a lightly damp rag.  There were two reasons that I bothered sanding a laminate table.  One, so that the bumpy finish that was left from the watermarks was knocked down and smooth, the other was to rough up the surface so that paint would adhere.

It may not look sanded, but it is.  The table was much smoother.  As you can see there are two leaves that fold down, making the priming and painting take a bit longer than if it had just been a simple table.

The next step was to prime and then to paint.

I put on one thick coat of primer on the top and leaves, and accessible sides of the legs.  Then I folded the leaves up and painted the underside and the other sides of the legs.  It looks much better already!

I let the primer dry for several hours & then applied the first coat of Satin White paint.  Then this morning I applied the other half of the first coat and a second coat to the table top, to be sure that it was coated well.

I was so excited to take the picture, that the paint hadn't even dried yet!  Here is the finished table though. 

However, this will not be the last time you see this table.  There was so much more to do to the kitchen nook to get it ready!  You'll see it again soon when the entire renovation of that room is complete!  It will be back in it's happy spot in the nook.