Before & After

 My sister's college roommates abandoned quite a few things when they moved out this spring, and the adoption of much of those items fell to me! Some just needed a little cleaning, and others became projects of Tender-Loving-Care. The best part was probably that, since these items were free, fear of failure was exceedingly low. It lent a sort of reckless freedom to the whole thing. 

One item was a junky little endtable, complete with faux wood laminate layered over plywood, swollen little spots from water damage, and gum stuck to the underside of the table lip. Yeah, lovely. This is the BEFORE:

My steps of TLC involved:

1. removing the door handles...and the gum

2. a little sanding all over

3. about 3 separate coats of door paint from Menards (with minimum 24 hours between coats to allow drying)

4. reattaching the door handles...

...and voila! The crappy freebie furniture is now "in disguise"! And below are the pics to prove it.

The first coat applied:

And the triumphant AFTER:

 Note with this that although the door paint seemed like a great choice at first, and it dried perfectly smooth on all the vertical sides, the top dried in sort of a crackly-crinkly way. Although unexpected, the crackly paint does give the table a distressed look, which is very in-style right now & which I was happy to keep. It is still a mystery to me how this result occurred.

Some theories are that door paint should be thinned more before this sort of project or perhaps the final coat was too thick. Any other theories are welcome in the comments. 

This is my first experience with choosing and preparing paint, and I certainly didn't realize how many types of paint there are. If you're about to do your first project, take a note from my experience book and do research on your project, appropriate paints, and necessary preparations (primers, sandpaper, paint-thinning, etc). Also look into clean-up, such as using paint thinner to clean your brushes and remove paint from your hands, which I unknowingly needed for cleaning up my oil-based door paint. Thankfully, there just happened to be a can of it laying around and I was saved explaining away the black paint splatters in my in-law's sink.!!

A little side by side comparison - so happy with the finished, "disguised" table!! =)