Please to be ignoring the mitre saw and the ugly, ugly fan. The saw is for the quarter round, the fan is a work in progress 
Managed to work a half day Saturday, come home, paint up a storm in the Living Room, lay down for a 2 hour nap before an evening out hunting good photos….and then we woke up 12 hours later.
Oops!
Well…at least the Living Room looks AWESOME.
Next on the Living Room todo list was to spackle, tape and paint the walls. After a kind soul lent us an 8′ ladder (thank you Freecycle!) in order to reach the high end of our sloped ceilings, the Wee-b managed to finish taping up the room last week.
We picked up 2 gallons of paint in our new favourite colour (Behr – Dolphin Fin) with the thought that we would probably need a third, but it was better to wait and see. Woke up yesterday morning bright and early and got to work!
1 coat down…one to go. And…we only managed to use one gallon for the entire room. I have NO idea how that happened.
P.S. I love you frog tape.
So lets begin with the overall cost breakdown of my cool new table..
Cost Breakdown
Table – free
4x Legs – $60 (Ikea)
1x Oil-Based Primer - $7.98 (Home Depot)
1x Semi-gloss Latex Paint – $7.94 (Home Depot)
1x Semi-gloss Poly – $16.57 (Home Depot)
Painting supplies – had these around the house already
Total – $92.49
I’m pretty pleased with that….compared to the cost of a new table! And now…on to the remainder of the project…
For the record, lets just say that you need to make sure you are using a very, very, VERY clean brush before beginning to apply polycrylic to your very cool table. Or you may find yourself sanding back a layer and applying a 5th coat of black paint.
Or not. You know…if you’re awesome like me, you probably didn’t have to do this…
So. One table. One layer of primer, four five coats of black semi-gloss and two coats of poly later and we have this masterpiece
Now I just need to remove the rest of the skirt and replace each leg one by one. I got a little excited the other night and hammered off the skirt that is attached to the middle leaf. Looking pretty good so far…
Well maybe a little longer than that….but (drumroll please) TA-DAAA!
To say that i am IN LOVE with this table would be a severe understatement. Once it has gone through its requisite 3 day drying period we will throw it back in the eating room and I will take a new picture with the NEW chairs.
I know…baited breath and all that.
Mondays are my half-days at work so I made plans with myself, to stop by the deee-pot on the way home to pick up some painting supplies to get started on the (long awaited) Dining Table project.
I began by showing off to the dog and carting the table outside by myself. Lets just say that neither Giz nor my back were very impressed. In fact, my back is telling me that that was probably not the smartest idea. But honestly, when did i ever start listening to my back? Geez.
I got that bad boy moved outside and ended up extending the table out so that there was a slight gap between all three pieces. My thought being that this might reduce the occurrence of paint gloop (yes that is a technical term) between the edges. Then I got to bust out my cute little mouse sander. Once again, i have proven that the smaller you are, the cuter you appear to be. And not only is this little sander cute, but it also packs a punch! I managed to get the whole table sanded down in less than 15 minutes!
After a quick wipe down, I applied my one coat of oil-based primer (Kilz Original). Now…in hindsight, I wish that I had applied this coat with a roller as opposed to a paint brush as even though i tried to keep the coat super thin and even, i can still kind of see the brush marks. The primer took less than 30 minutes to dry, but I left it alone for a good hour before applying my first coat of paint….just to be sure.
Coat 1!
I applied the first coat (RustOleum Semi-gloss) as thin as possible, while trying to make sure that I got the paint applied evenly all over. You can see in the picture how visible the brush strokes were from the primer coat, luckily this got a lot less noticeable with each additional coat of paint.
It was actually a really nice day outside, so other than having to wipe a coat of green pollen off each time I wanted to paint another coat, everything moved along really well. Ahh…DC in the springtime!
Coat 2! Now we’re getting somewhere! This is the second coat after it is all dry and as you can see, the brush strokes are slowly fading underneath the weight of the paint The semi-gloss finish of the paint was starting to show up here as well and I was semi-starting to think that this project may have a happy ending!
All in all I ended up applying one coat of oil-based primer and four thin even layers of a latex based paint in semi-gloss black.
Cut a hole in the box..
Or something like that 
We got the first coat of paint on the wall in the Guest Bedroom! It looks awesome….its amazing what a great coat of coloured paint can do for a room when you are used to living in a stark white home.
One more coat to go…we stumbled across a slight issue with one of the walls. I had to dig out a crack where the brilliant minds who built this place patched two pieces of drywall together with chewing gum…or putty or something. Its patched and drying so we need to wait for that to be complete before we can toss up the second coat.
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