I bought an antique farmhouse table at a small town antique store a few weeks ago. Since it was missing all the leaves, I planned to dismantle it and use it for parts, but once I brought it home, pulled it open, and saw just how huge it is, I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Now, we already have a farmhouse table (seen here) that we built with an old cellar door as the top, but I saw a lot more potential with this table. When closed, it takes up less space than our current table, but when extended, it would easily seat 10 people. Mind you, our kitchen isn’t large enough to fully extend it, but if we ever add on a dining room to our house (which I hope will happen someday, we could open this baby all the way up and seat lots of people. At some point, we plan to make or buy new leaves for it.
It’s pretty rare that all 6 members of my family are home for dinner together these days, so it will be nice to have a table that doesn’t take up so much floor space, but allows for more people if needed.
Even though it has a scorch mark on one side, I decided not to paint over the top, because it has really pretty wood grain, and some antique nails that I just didn’t want to cover.
Instead, I just sanded smooth the really rough spots, and restained the top.
I contemplated leaving the legs original as well, but there were several paint splatters on them. In hindsight, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to lightly sand off those splatters, and I have no idea why I didn’t at least try it first, but I got a vision that chippy paint would look so awesome over that old wood, so chippy white paint, I had to have – forget being sensible.
Here’s the problem – I had only about 1/3 a bag of milk paint. I clearly wasn’t thinking at all, because a full bag of milk paint powder makes 1 quart, so 1/3 a bag of powder would only make 1/3 of a quart. Even though I was only going to paint the legs and skirt under the table top, did I mention that there are 6 legs on this table? There was no way that amount of paint was going to cover all 6 legs, but as I said, I wasn’t thinking. I mixed up my paint and happily started painting away, until I got to the 3rd leg and realized the problem. There isn’t a single place in my town that sells milk paint of any brand, so unless I wanted to order some and wait for it to arrive (and I’m nowhere near that patient), my vision of chippy painted legs wasn’t going to happen. On the upside, it wasn’t going to happen anyway, because the paint wasn’t chipping at all, except for one spot, right under the top, which wouldn’t really be visible anyway.
I was kicking myself that I didn’t leave the legs unpainted, but there was no going back, so I moved on to Plan B.
Thankfully, my husband had just brought home a full gallon of paint, so I mixed up a batch of homemade chalk paint, and repainted first 3 legs, and painted the other 3. The paint covered them all beautifully, thank goodness. I should have done this to begin with, but thinking ahead isn’t my biggest strength.
Blue Minerals is one of my sponsors, but this is my totally unbiased opinion – this powder is the best stuff. It costs a fraction of what brand name chalk paint costs, covers like a dream, and gives beautiful results. In the past, I had always mixed up my own chalk-like paint with plaster of paris, but I love the results with Blue Minerals so much more. If you’ve been making your own chalky paint, you’ll want to try Blue Minerals and see the difference. It’s a great product that gives better results, in my opinion.
I’m loving my new old table!
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