Hey Y’all! This will be a long one, but I’ll try and keep it as simple as possible. A lot of details went into making over this cute little set for my daughter. The table and chairs came from a dear friends house. I acquired it long before my daughter was even a thought, but for some reason I held onto it. Now it has a perfect little home with her for as long as she’s willing to love it.
You can see it was a complete and utter mess, but I could still see the beauty in it. Crazy I know.
One of the first things I needed to figure out was if I could even come close to bringing the metal back to life. If that wasn’t possible then I wasn’t sure what my plan would be. After some research I settled on bar keepers friend. We ordered it off Amazon. I wasn’t convinced it would work but I thought it was worth a shot.
As you can see the metal was in pretty bad shape. I followed the directions on the container. Using a towel, water, my husband, and a whole lot of elbow grease, we started to see the metal transform right before our eyes. If I hadn’t of been there for the process, I wouldn’t have believed how well this stuff works. BUT IT DOES. I definitely recommend it. The outcome isn’t perfect but it’s definitely close.
Now I needed to address the neglected table top. Not only did it have years worth of damage and stains, but it also had dried paint on the top, because I may or may not have used it as a surface to paint other projects on a time or two. OOPS! Nothing a razor blade couldn’t fix.
After I got all of the dried paint off I cleaned the snot out of it! I mean I really scrubbed to make sure anything gross was gone forever. The second picture above is discoloration from years of neglect. There wasn’t really an easy way to bring it back to life, so doing something totally new felt like my best option. I gave it a very light base coat of yellow paint. I used our chalk paint mix that you can find here. That provided the surface for the magic to really happen.
CUE THE NAPKINS!!
Obviously I have mod podged stuff to things a million times before, but using napkins was a totally new thing for me. I found the napkins I used at party city. They are awesome and I plan to use them on other furniture in my daughter’s room. I did part of the table live on facebook and you can watch that here if you are interested. Otherwise, you can check out this blog post (COMING SOON) where I go into detail about decoupaging napkins.
I couldn’t be happier with my choice to go the napkin route. I JUST LOVE IT!!!! Who knew napkins could transform a piece in such an amazing way!? I chose material for the seats that matched the coral color in the napkins pretty closely. Covering them was very simple, and I used batting to add some cushion.
All that was left after I covered the seats was to put it all together and show it to my daughter! Y’all! I’m absolutely IN LOVE with how it came out.
I can just imagine the tea parties we will have together at this table! Maybe she’ll even pass it on to her daughter one day! I couldn’t imagine anything better!
If you love it as much as I do can you do me a little favor and….
PIN IT FOR LATER…?
As always you can find Erin and I on facebook, pinterest, and instagram. If you aren’t following us there you can click on over and show us some love. We’d love to have you. You can also subscribe to the blog for updates if you’d like!! See ya soon with more fun DIY projects!
~Lizzy
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