I’m going to start this post off a little different than normal and show you the finished product first.

See this adorable little table?

It was a total pain in the butt. Projects going wrong before they go right seems to be a theme around here.

I bought the table back in January for $10 at a thrift store. I actually finished it during No Spend February

 but couldn’t show it to you because it was part of the Every Creative Endeavor contest (it won first place in round two!).

Here is the before picture…

(In case your wondering where my crappy $5 table went, it now happily resides on the other side of the couch.)

So here’s the process. It may seem like I did this in a matter of hours or a day or something…it actually took about a week of being an in-progress mess on  my kitchen floor (aka my workshop). Just FYI.

First, the boys and I sanded,

and then removed all the hardware.

Next came the painting. This piece wasn’t the easiest to paint…I was really wishing I had cheated and stocked up on white spray paint before February started.

I wanted to do a design on the top, so I painted the octagon insert blue (left over from the toy box – which I had mixed from leftover kitchen paint. Resourceful, yes. Cheap, you bet!).

For this part I turned to my friend Katie from CRAPTASTIC, who did a tutorial for her zebra table.

First I taped off the outside..

then completely filled it with painters tape (This is frog tape).

I decided to copy the leaf pattern from a chair I have in the living room, so I tried to trace and transfer it using parchment paper.

It wasn’t working out all that well though, so I ditched that idea and decided to free hand it.

 Much easier.

Next I cut it out using an exacto knife…while wearing my painting uniform of course. I swear I wear regular clothes sometimes!

Then I gave it a quick coat with the base color again. The top is textured and I wanted to keep the lines crisp, this way the base coat fills all the cracks instead of the pattern color. I didn’t let it dry all the way before applying the leaf color – which was the base color mixed with white.

Then came the exciting part – taking the tape off to reveal my perfectly crisp leaf pattern.

Except that’s not even close to what happened.

I caaaaaarefully peeled back the tape…..and when I was done, well, this is what I was left with.

I did not freak out -at least not out loud. I hurried over to my pantry and grabbed a ginormo handful of chocolate chips and thought about how I was going to fix it.

Now, if I wasn’t entering it in a contest I would have painted it over in blue and called it a day. After four days of working on it I was pretty over this table. But I WAS entering it and I had to make it work.

So yeah, I hand painted it. It took two more days worth of nap times… and along the way I really started to hate this table.

Thank goodness it turned out well!

The last step was to glaze it. You can’t have a furniture piece with detail like this and not bring it out with glaze, right? I used the same process as I did with my experimental frame and used the base blue color.

Glazing didn’t really go as planned either, but when I compared the finished door with the plain one I had to keep going.

Next I gave it some super light distressing, put the hardware back, on and was done…finally!

Looking for more furniture ideas? Check out THIS POST.