When Kevin and I got married we had nothing. Ground breaking stuff right? A newly married couple with nothing and no money. Well, our families took pity on us and supplied us with all sorts of things with which to furnish our new home and start our lives together. We were grateful for everything we were given but we wanted to try to make them our own. The first thing on the list was our table.
This wasn’t just any table though – it was a table with a serious story behind it.
Once upon a time, in a land not so far away, there was a table. This table had a very misfortunate accident. This all happened when the table was living in my parent’s kitchen. We were on vacation when the person watching the house took the heat lamp off the chameleon cage to feed the animal. After putting the crickets in the cage and replacing the top this individual left – forgetting to replace the heat lamp. He was completely horrified when he arrived the next day to discover the heat lamp had slowly burned its way through the table and was now laying on the floor. Seeing as we didn’t want to play “try to miss the hole” each time we ate, the table was moved to the garage and a new one took its place. (This new table is the one Kira and Zac received when they got married.) The burned table was given to the pets. The dog slept below it, and the cats slept and ate on top of it. One cat also had the nasty habit of throwing up on it quite frequently. This abuse went on for about five years.
When Kevin and I were getting married my dad offered to give us the table. However, it would take a lot of work to get the table fit to eat off and it didn’t have any chairs to go with it. (Nothing happened to the chairs when the table was burned so although we had two of the “same” tables there was only one set of chairs and those went to Kira and Zac.) We were hesitant to accept. Not because of the lack of chairs and the state of the table but because we didn’t want to make a ton of work for my dad. However, after looking for dining sets and realizing even the cheapest ones were way out of our price range we asked dad if he would really be willing to repair the table. Being the wonderful man that he is, he repaired the table for us. We seriously couldn’t have been more grateful.
Getting that table back to a useable condition was not easy. First, he sanded off years of grime and various stains from the tabletop and legs. Then he cut away all of the remaining charred wood and filled the hole by sticking in sections of poplar. He then had to sand it one more time to make sure the tabletop was even. The table looked absolutely beautiful. You never would have guessed it spent five years sitting in the garage being battered by animals. You could see the poplar patch pretty clearly in the maple tabletop but it was a functioning table and we were ecstatic to have it.
We had all sorts of grand plans for the table – we were going to stain the top to be nice and dark (it kinda’ had to be to disguise the patch) and paint the legs – but we just never seemed to make the time – isn’t that always how it seems to go? We finally got the kick in the butt we needed when we found out we wouldn’t be able to re-up our lease in Springville for another year. See, our condo in Springville had a garage, which would be the perfect place to do staining and painting, where as our new apartment would not. And we did not want to work with stain in a carpeted area or inside the house.
We decided to try to complete the project before we moved, so off to Home Depot we went. We decided to go with a really dark stain with a red tint to it. Neither of us had ever stained a piece of wood in our lives and it was certainly a learning experience. A few things we learned along the way:
- Maple is really difficult to stain
- Do not try to use a stain and poly in one for your first staining attempt
- Do not listen to all the directions online and the guy at Home Depot who tell you to wipe on the stain, let it sit, and wipe it off – this is not what you do when working with a stain and poly in one.
- You won’t learn lesson three until the second coat because you somehow managed to wipe off the stain pretty well and have a decent looking table after the first coat. However, every time you try to fix a mistake on the second coat you will only make things ten times worse.
- When staining a difficult piece of furniture with a difficult to use stain you will likely fall out of love with said piece of furniture many times before becoming completely overjoyed with the final product (not to mention that the project from you-know-where is finally done).
Yes, the first layer of stain looked ok. The second coat was a complete disaster – we would try to fix a streak and would end up completely messing up the stain. I became very discouraged and kept repeating over and over how much I hated this table and how I couldn’t believe I had ever suggested trying to stain it. Hadn’t I learned anything from Kira and Zac’s difficult ordeal trying to stain their table?
Kevin and I quickly decided that we would wait until my parents came down to help us move before trying anything else with the table. We convinced our landlord to let us use the garage for a few days after moving out so we could finish the table. When my dad arrived he sanded the table (again) replaced one of the pieces of poplar (it was pretty green and was a lot darker than everything else when stained) and helped us with attempt number two. Attempt number two also failed. Although by the end of attempt two we had figured out a technique we thought would work. So, dad sanded the table, again, and we started over, again. Attempt number three was the charm. It still wasn’t perfect. There are still lines – but we decided to embrace them. We made sure we went from one edged of the table to the other, following the grain of the wood, in one stroke. We figured as long as the lines were straight we could pretend they were part of the wood grain.
After a few coats of stain and a few good coats of polyurethane we had a beautiful tabletop that we were incredibly proud of. And, happily, I actually loved the table again. It was as though I suddenly forgot what a pain in the butt the table had been and all the times I had loudly declared how much I hated it. By this point we had been using the garage for about three or four extra days since moving to North Orem and it was time to leave for real, so we loaded the table into the car (which was quite the ordeal in itself) and brought it home without having time to paint the legs.
As a result the table legs remained in their sanded and unfinished state for another 6 months. We finally painted the legs when we went up to the Conrad’s house for Christmas. Kevin suggested that we paint the legs white since he thought the combination of the dark tabletop and white legs looked really nice. I, however, thought it would look even better with more of a cream. I thought it would fit better with the red-ish hue of the stain. It just goes to show that I should listen to Kevin more often. We ended up getting “antique white” which turned out to be quite yellow and even a little orange. Neither of us loved it when we were spraying it on but as we had already purchased the paint and started the process we decided to just go with it and see how it looked with the tabletop when we got home. We weren’t in love, but seeing as it was finished we left it rather than painting again. Yes, we are in fact that lazy. It stayed that way until about a month ago when I finally got around to making the table legs match our newly painted chairs. And guess what color it went? White! Yep, the hubs was right, the white looks absolutely amazing and I am seriously in love with the table now. I don’t think Kevin and I will ever want to replace that table. It has such a great story behind it and we have put so much time in to it. And hey, its various changes are part of our first three years of marriage, which is fun. 
