my yellow umbrella: Crate & Barrel Meets Goodwill

I'm so excited to show you this before and after! Remember seeing this in the sneak preview last week?

Well, if you looked closely in this picture, you might have noticed it in the background...

And here it is in all of its glory! I found this "jewel" of a side table at the Salvation Army for $6. (So this is actually Crate & Barrel Meets Salvation Army...but that just doesn't roll off of the tongue quite as nicely!) I originally thought it would be fun to just repaint it, give the top a fun design and move on with life. As I thought more on this, I realized that, because of the ovular shape, I would most likely need to use a stencil. Remember what happens when I use stencils?

Yeah. I'm still recovering from that one.

Needless to say, a stencil was not going to happen. But I really wanted this table to be special. I wanted to try something new. The standard black or white just wasn't going to cut it...no, this table needed to say something.

Then, I remembered that I'd been oogling over the look of raw wood and metal. This side table from Crate & Barrel retails for $299. Yee-ouch.

So I figured, hey? Why not use my $6 table and go for the same look? I started by sanding all of the paint off of the top. It already looked a million times better!

Ah, clean wood.

I unscrewed the base from the top and started working on the pieces separately.

The top got a neutral stain and polycrylic finish. The legs got a coat of gray primer and several coats of Krylon hammered metal paint.

As you can see, it looks more like shiny metal than hammered metal. Wah wahhh...

I don't know if I just wasn't using it correctly, if it was too cold outside (45 degrees), or what, but it didn't turn out quite like I was hoping. You can see on one of the side pieces that it started to look like hammered metal, but that's the only piece that bore any resemblance to anything hammered.