In June, our neighborhood had the big hoopdy-do garage sale where everyone pitches their old junk and tries to get $5 for it. Let’s be real, no one actually makes money doing a garage sale. I bet if you kept track of all the time you spent marking items with dumb little price tags, plus the cost of said price tags, plus the hours you sat in your garage watching people talk crap about your collection of Precious Moments figurines, you’d come away with like, $.32 an hour for a whole weekend’s worth of work. My suggestion? DONATE IT! Tax write off, holla atcha. Anyway, not a big garage saler myself (in case the previous sentence didn’t give that away already), my sister and I went strolling with the babes just trying to see if we found someone trying to sell something awesome, like a broken briefcase that secretly contains a million dollars but was sold to us for $2 (after we negotiated them down from $3 because duh, that’s how garage sales work). Turns out we didn’t find a million dollar briefcase (wop wop) but I did come away with a pretty decent coffee table (among a couple other junky things that I told Stockton “I PROMISE I’LL UPCYCLE THAT AND MAKE IT COOL BABE I LOVE YOU” except, yeah, it’s still all sitting either in the garage or the basement serving no purpose other than to create fights and raise Stockton’s blood pressure, WOOPS!). The coffee table was solid maple (no before pictures, though, because that would make me actually a purposeful blogger who PLANS things and PREPARES for WELL THOUGHT OUT posts, and don’t you KNOW me?!). It had clearly been loved by the family as evidenced by all of the colorful illustrations that were all over it (Alexis wuz here and she hearts Bobby written in hot pink highlighter, etc.). Starting price: $35. My takeaway price: $23. How I got it that low?
Yeah, something along those lines.
Anyway, after sitting in my garage for 3 months, I finally decided to tackle it today. I’m sure if you’ve spent all of 30 seconds on Pinterest, you’ve seen this pin (or one like it) which is allegedly a tutorial for how to do this in an intelligent and careful manner. Ha. I only needz the picturez cuz I’m a 1/2 az.
My “before” coffee table actually looked a lot like the before in this picture but it was a rectangle and had a drawer in the side that I had to incorporate into the finished piece.
And so, a shoddy play by play of how a haphazard DIYer threw some fabric and batting on a table and turned it into a Coffee Tottoman (you’re welcome for the new vocabulary).
1) Sand your table a little (I don’t know, they say it’s important, something about the paint sticking, yada yada. I do this by going, “STOCKTON!!! I need your heeeeelp.” Gotta get you a hubsband for the grunty stuff).
2) Wait 3 months and fight with your husband about that FRIGGING TABLE THAT IS STILL IN THE GARAGE FRIGGIN A!
3) Spray paint the table legs and sides (skip the top since you’re covering it anyway, doy). I think I put two-ish coats on here. Seemed good enough. It’s going in the basement for crying out loud. It’s sole purpose is probably going to serve as a big, toxic teether for Navy anyway.
4) Let dry. Drink some wine during this period. Also: eat chipotle.
5) Here’s where we get technical. Once it was in the basement, I had to cover the whole thing in enough batting to make it squishy enough that it felt like an ottoman and not just a table covered in fabric. When you’re a seamstress with a shopping problem, it happens to be quite convenient that you have 18 yards of foam batting on hand (who woulda thunk) so cut a few pieces to size (in my case, it was 3 base pieces). Then for the top piece, I did a 4″ overlap on each side to pillow the sides.
6) Staple all of the batting to the underside of the table. Get bored. Drink more wine. Start getting distracted and work faster and sloppier because of said boredom. Note that you should never offer your services as an upholsterer.
7) Then we go in with the fabric. I bought 2 yards of cotton fabric (it was on sale for $5 something/yard) to cover it. I opted to not go with home dec fabric because a) the selection of home dec fabrics at my local fabric store were blegh and b) home dec fabric is more expensive and hello this was a $23 table for crying out loud. I didn’t want to spend more on the fabric than the whole table. My goal when searching for fabric was to find a nice pattern that contained the colors grey, tan, yellow, black, and/or eggplant (since those are primarily the other colors in my basement). Found this fabric and basically just said “Grey, tan, yellow, black, SOLD!” It was good enough, and it’s kinda pretty. Probably not usually my style, but I like it.
8) Staple again. SO BORING WITH THE STAPLING. Who would suspect that stapling fabric to the bottom of a table could be so tantamount to poking your eyes out with toothpicks!? I mean… I think I have terrible, undiagnosed ADD which doesn’t help when doing such monotonous work as this, too, sooooo I maaayyyy have gotten a little sloppy near the end. I was just so hot and bored and thirsty and IS IT OVER YET?! OK, I don’t like stapling. Topic can now be put to rest.
9) Step back and say, “Self? You are not bad. That’ll do, Donkey.”
Total budget breakdown (because this is what real DIY bloggers do at the end of their posts):
Table: $23
Paint: I don’t know ’cause I already owned it
Batting: had it (see: hoarder)
Fabric: $10
Wine: Roughly $3/glass – drink at your own risk when staples are involved
