About five years ago we had purchased a dining table from Ikea, it was pine with an antiqued looking stain.  Well…I went through a “white” phase in decorating our home and decided to paint it all white.  Now….I made my husband take it to the hanger where he works so we could use their paint booth and equipment to make it easier to paint the matching chairs etc.   So, having five children means that our table gets a lot of use and abuse…My husband had the idea that in order to make sure it was durable we should use the same paint that they use on their airplanes…

Okay…NEVER do this!!!  Good idea at the time…maybe, durable yes, maybe even bullet proof!…Ha, Ha …. but when I decided that I was tired of the white and started to strip the paint off the top???  Baaaaaad idea for sure!!!!  Did I mention that this table even spent the winter outside under our deck uncovered in the elements WITHOUT any damage to it?  This paint is TOUGH!

After going through gallons of paint stripper just to get the above result I finally went back to the hanger to see if I could get whatever stripper they use to remove the paint off the planes when repainting them…

Turns out I’m not really allowed to do that…hmph!  So, back I went and tried a few other types of strippers….I ended up having to do mostly muscle work, scraping and scraping until I couldn’t feel my arms anymore!

After 9 hours of scraping and a lot of sanding I finally ended up with this…

Next… looking at the legs and knowing how difficult it was to get the paint off the table top…all I could think of was the severe pain I had in my hands and wrists!  I knew that the stripper bubbled and made the paint flake a bit and I wondered if it would give the table a rustic sort of chippy look without having to go through the pains of getting it all off.

Turns out I loved the effect!  I stained the table top with a black stain and gave it a few coats of varnish to seal it.  Then I decided to wash over the chippy looking legs with the black stain to tone down the white and tie it in with the top better.  It turned out wonderful!  It certainly does not look like an Ikea table anymore!

So until I find the perfect chairs to go with this table I am using some antique dining chairs that I bought off the internet.  They need some fixing up but they kinda go with the table well enough for now.

See the Board and batten on the living/dining room walls?  Stay tuned for that make over as well :0)

Hope you have a great weekend!

Terry

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