Awesomest Coffee Table Ever! Or, I've Had Too Many Washington Apples....

All righty-roo, I've had a few Washington Apples tonight courtesy of the mister (are you seeing a theme here?) so it's time for yet another blog installment. This is long, yo. Two in a a month. Go me. Ugh, I am terrible at this blog thing. Whatevs.

So we had this cheap coffee table that we've had for the past 4-ish that was starting to look like crap. By cheap I mean it actually cost us about -$200. We bought a couch, a week later the couch was on sale with a free ottoman or coffee table, I called and got the coffee table with a couple hundred back. Pretty much the highlight of my year. Well, second third to getting married and buying a house and whatnot.

So I stumbled upon this cool coffee table redo at Mr. Kate. How easy is that?! And I had the perfect book; some old French book that was falling apart. It was seriously old. The book was held together with wire. My mom, who was down visiting for part of this project, and I joked that it was probably some priceless book whose pages I was ripping out and covering with a generous layer of Mod Podge. I don't want to know, so I won't be showing any close-ups. That, and I have a shitty camera that doesn't do closeups.Here's how this project went:

1. Crappy coffee table Day 1:

You can kind of see the scuzz (feel free to start using that word. You can apply it to people as well.) on the top of it, especially on the left side.

2. Now, in the original instructions there is nothing about primer. I though this was a little odd but figured maybe there was something different about painting on coffee tables so they don't need primer.Right? I think I did about five layers of paint on the legs. I swear I had a picture of it, but I can't find it now. Oh well. 

3. By approximately day 8 I was ready to start Mod Podging the book pages on. Why yes, I left the coffee table outside the whole time. It was kind of windy, and dirt blows around our yard like no other, so I basically painted over little bits of dirt. Oh, and the bristles were falling out of the cheap brush I used. Fuck, I should not be refinishing furniture. It gives the table texture or something.  

4. Somewhere around day 12 it rained on my table. I had been good about covering it up with a tarp, (which I had once accidentally run over with the lawn mower so one corner of it is shredded up) but I forgot to was too lazy that night. I was already in my pajamas when the weatherman said we had a 20% chance of rain, and I didn't want to get off the couch, so I decided to take my chances. The next day I had to scrape the wet, goopy pages off the top of the table.

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5. Day 13 or so I decided to just paint the top the same color as the rest of the table, but having learned from my mistake of not using primer, I also bought some spray primer. And apparently spray primer comes in colors other than white. Who knew? Apparently any good crafter, that's who. So I picked up some grey primer. Big whoop. The primer would help somehow, and I'd need less coats of paint, right? Wrong again. Shocking. The paint wasn't very even, and the table was a whole lot of yellow. It looked like the sun. I like the sun well enough, but I didn't want to look at it in my living room every day.

6. Blah, blah, blah, a month or so later I finally finished the fucking coffee table. I had the brilliant (seriously, I was so proud of myself I would get a craft high when I thought about it) idea to cover the top of the coffee table in homemade chalkboard paint! Awww, E. could learn her ABCs on the table (or Leapster, whatever)! The mister and I could play rousing games of Tic Tac Toe--cat game again! Har har har!--whilst watching wholesome television programming. The table is actually chalkboardish in that we can draw on it with chalk; however, I think I used too much grout to paint. Basically to make chalkboard paint you mix unsanded grout with the paint of your choice. I swear I saw one site that had a 1-to-1 ratio, but of course I can't find it now. Washington Apples. This was super thick, like I could only do barely two coats thick. So, I think if you do this fucking awesome project you should do less than 1:1.

7. Coffee table finally finished approximately December 23rd. Time for the unveil! I rolled this beauty into our back room aka Bananas Room, aka living room, while my husband was at work. I couldn't wait for him to get home from work to show him the awesomeness I had created! I chose a grey color for the top. I thought it complemented the yellow well, though my matching skillz are teh suck. Ta da!

The mister hates it. HATES. He said it should be in our daughter's (non-existent) playroom. My bad? Gah, I hate that saying so much. "Whoops, my bad? Teeheehee!" HATE.

However, the day after Christmas he got up at 5:30 to go purchase this:

So, which would you rather have in your house? Yeah, probably the Santa.