More Thriftyness

After many, many hours of stripping, scraping, sanding, patching, caulking, painting, and drinking wine... my latest furniture project is finally complete!  A while back, I found a photo of a dining room table made from an old door.  I immediately loved the idea, and figured it would be a cool look for an outdoor patio table.  I hadn't made any serious attempts to find such a door, but the last time Josh and I were in Santa Fe, we stopped by the Habitat ReStore to look around and found this great door.

At first I didn't even realize that the side panels were made of glass instead of wood, and I loved the carved decorative panels in the center.  We realized pretty quickly that this thing was coated in probably 6-7 layers of paint, the wood surface was not in the best of shape, and the caulk around the glass panels was practically disintegrating.  I didn't really have a plan for how this door would become a table, but the first step was to strip everything down so that I could figure out how to paint the thing.

The de-painting process took me about three weekends to finish.  We went through a big tub of heavy-duty paint stripper and I destroyed a couple of brushes and scrapers while working on the door, which was set up on sawhorses in the front yard.  FYI:  Paint stripper hurts like hell when it gets splattered on bare feet.  I recommend not wearing sandals when dealing with such substances.

I finally got most of the paint scraped off with a lot of elbow grease and managed to clean all of the paint off of the glass (which, remarkably, is in great shape with the exception on a crack in one panel).  Josh helped me patch up some of the cracks and low spots in the wood, I re-caulked all of the glass, and then we gave it a good sanding to prepare for paint.

I decided on some bright Southwestern colors and got to work painting.  Mostly this went smoothly and quickly, but detailing the carved areas in the middle panels took a lot of time with a small brush.  Not knowing if I'd be able to make it look the way I wanted, my backup plan was to simply keep the middle panels a solid color.  Luckily, it turned out pretty well.

Finally, we picked up some table legs from Lowe's and after I painted them to match the table, Josh got to use his power tools to put things together.  

TA-DA!  Now we just need to find some funky, mismatched old chairs that I can paint and put on the patio with our new table.  Hitting up the garage sales this weekend in hopes of scoring something cool.  Barbecue time is just around the corner.