Growing up, my parents had three tables in the living room that they purchased shortly before they got married–one long low coffee table and two matching side tables. All three were that quintessential Mid-Century Modern slat-style, and they were solid fixtures of my childhood. For example, I remember using the slats to help organize the various denominations of money for various board games like Monopoly or PayDay. Over the years, though, the tables picked up various stains and discolorations and were eventually relegated to my parents’ basement.
Fast-forward to autumn 2021 when I drove out to Ohio to help them reorganize their basement, and the tables were added to my wee pile of stuff to ship out here to Purgatory, as I had an idea. Well, really I had two ideas, but the first idea I ended up not liking so I went with the second one.
The tables arrived and they sat in the storage room of the studio building for almost a year. But then Agent Smith’s father visited, and was more than happy to clean them up for me. He even managed to sand the tapered legs, but he only sanded the ones for the side tables, because a friend of ours who loves woodworking worked some new legs up for me. Which always reminds me of one of my favorite ExplodingDog.com comics. It is aptly titled, “Who Needs Legs?” If you are not familiar with ExplodingDog, I am sad for you and you should go check out the rest of the site and not just the one comic I linked.
But I digress…tables…this post is about tables. Here, finally, are some pics of the tables prior to making their journey to California.
And then some pics of the sanding process:
Then it was time to stain all three tables and all twelve legs. I also needed new glides for the legs (both old and new)…and that is when things started to go off the rails. While the stain I had left over from the dining room table worked, and looked great on the tables themselves and the original eight short legs, the new legs did not like that stain. I had to sand off the stain from one of them three times before I finally found something that was a close enough match that I could call it a day.
Here’s a shot of the new legs after the first stain attempt. As you can see, they needed something much much darker. In the end I found some goo in a tube that worked really well, but you will have to wait for the next post to see the finished results–and the table lamps from the last post.
