Saving a Badly Up-cycled Coffee Table!

Up-cycling – a phenomenon that swept across the country in recent years, basically slapping some paint on old furniture (Kirsty Alsopp I’m looking at you) or irrevocably altering an original piece of vintage clothing (Dawn O Porter I’m looking at you)! Sometimes it really works and I love that an an old un-loved item has been given a new lease of life. Half the furniture in my house was bought in charity shops and lovingly brightened up with a lick of Laura Ashley paint. But sometimes it doesn’t go so well!

When my husband returned from a car boot sale with a rather bright blue coffee table, I was left wondering if there was any hope for the poor old thing. But for £1, the table was definitely worth saving. After sitting in our shed un-loved for a year we decided to give the table a bit of a make-over and now it has a new life being loved in our living room. This is how we turned it from shabby shit to shabby chic.

First up, we gave the table a good sand (by ‘we’ I mean Rob, I just took the pictures). Once the worst of the thick blue paint has been removed, we sprayed it with stain block spray which you can pick up in most hardware stores. We always use this to prime furniture as it forms a nice even layer and covers up dark wood and paint.

Once primed, we gave it another sand, making sure to get inside all the little details, as well as making sure the whole table was nice and smooth ready for painting.

We then painted the table with two layers of cream emulsion paint and once dry finished it with a clear satin varnish.

We decided to cover the top with this map wallpaper from B&Q. We chose it because the colour went well with our paint choice, however given the chance to do it again I would probably choose a brighter more modern paper design. We carefully pencilled the outline of the table onto the wallpaper, before cutting it out and sticking it down with wallpaper paste.

To finish the top of the table and make it waterproof and protected from tea and coffee stains we sprayed with a few layers of clear lacquer, we use the stuff designed from cars from Halfords. It takes quite a few layers to get a perfect finish, but it’s well worth the time.

And thats it! I think the table looks so much better, I may change the paper on the top at some point, but for now I’m so happy with how it turned out. The whole thing cost about £10 to complete as we already had all the materials except for the lacquer.