Painting a Coffee Table

My spousal unit is a huge fan of James Bond movies (aren’t all men?). Whenever there is a Bond Marathon on TV he sits there for hours watching the same movies he already knows by memory.

When he started working for his company years ago they assigned him a mail code. It was 006. It’s become an inside joke for us.

By the way, that is the reason I tackle so many things on my own. My husband’s job requires him to travel a lot, so lucky him that he got himself a wife that knows her way around a power drill.

Every time my dear husband goes on a trip he finds a home full of surprises, the most pleasant of which is, I assume, that I got around to complete some of the things on his honey-do list while he is cavorting in exotic locales.

Well, not so much cavorting as just finding his way around red tape, unreliable schedules and hard airport seats.

This is the coffee tablewe got from Amazon. I like the design, not to mention that the size was perfect for the narrow spot near the sectional. But if you are thinking that this table looks different than the one in my pictures, you are right.

You can see here the color of our floor. It’s a very dark brown, even darker than the table. I am on a quest to balance the heaviness of that floor, so I decided that the table had to stand out more.

And there were other issues too.

The coffee table needed painting, and as it turns out, it wasn’t as difficult as I thought. Here’s what I did.

I have nobody to blame but myself for marring the top of the table. I dropped some nail polish remover on it and it dissolved the stain on top. But the table had also suffered some damage during shipping, the top part was cracked along the edge, the damage was too visible to leave alone, and fixing it (with glue, then putty) would not have hidden them.

I partially disassembled the table to remove the lower part. and painted the top and lower part with white enamel paint using a foam roller.

I decided to leave the “legs” unpainted for two reasons. First because I wanted the contrast of the two finishes, and second because painting the legs would not have resulted in as good a finish with a roller.

And here’s the table finished. I like it much better now, not to mention that the enamel finish is tougher than the one it came with.

PS: While Pennywise was an insane clown from a horror movie, I want to make absolutely clear that I am not a clown.

Aunt Clara