For Instant Beauty... add Elbow Grease: Carly's Oak Round Table

This is Carly's oak round table. I didn't take a picture of it before I started sanding. Its your standard oak table with a very pretty pedistal.

Carly wanted a change so I had her look through pinterest and she found a table she loved (we just search road table with pedestal) There was no link to the photo we found so I googled around and finally found the original post for the table. There is a tutotial on there so go here if you want to see how to refinish this table. But here are some photos of my steps

tape and paint I used a very light grey

I didn't sand the pedestal I just used Zinsser oil based primer with my for oil based paint wooser brush. Then I had Carly go choose a dark turquoise that she liked just a pint (there was a lot left over too) I then used miniwax polycrylic water based over the 3rd coat of paint.

I took the tape off and here is what that looked like

One coat of Minwax Dark walnut

(I really need to find a better stain for oak, it doesn't soak in the minwax stains like I want it to.) I put the stain on the paint to "distress" it a little

I didn't do what the tutorial said next, this is going to be used a lot and cleaned a lot so I wanted it to have a tough top so I used my waterlox finish on it. It will yellow the paint color because of the oil in the finish, the same would happen with any oil based finish. Here is is after the first coat of Waterlox (I used a throw away craft foam brush for each layer)

Then when I ran my fingers over it I realized the painted stripes felt a little higher, my fingers could feel the difference between the wood and paint so I did 2 coats of waterlox on the wood only to make it a little more even because of the 3 coats of paint. I ended up needing to sand just of the lines between the stripes on the paint and stain to make it even and smooth. It worked

Then I waited 24 hours and did the second coat

Lightly sanding it all with 320 grit and did another coat

I did 5 coats total to make sure it was tough waiting at least 24 hours between each coat and sanding between every 2 coats. Then I waited 7 days for the top to cure and it was finished!! Here it is: