Before and 4 months After

before


Jared and I were on a mission. In my pregnant state, I somehow managed to convince my husband to go on a furniture shopping spree. We agreed on spending "x" amount. Surprisingly, we stayed within our "budget". That was, until the sales dude told us that I had picked out the most expensive fabric for our couch. Go figure. It's in my nature. Every time a magazine has, say, a section devoted to this season's "it bag", it is inevitable that I pick out the one that costs triple our mortgage. There was no tuning back now. We had already ingrained in our head's, the final outcome of the room. There was absolutely no other swatch on the planet that would suffice now. Well, actually there is because we ended up getting the wrong color when the couch was delivered, but that's another long, exhausting story.

Anyhoo-because of our splurge, we were now on a quest to find a few more items with a MUCH lower price tag, that we could spruce up ourselves. I found us a cute little kitchen set on Craigslist, that we were going to give a face-lift to. It wasn't anything too special, but with a new slap of paint, and some fun fabric on the seats, it would do. If memory serves me correctly, we paid 200 bucks for it, and they delivered it to our pad. Not too shabby.

Fast forward a month and a half later -the table is sitting in our basement, and the fabric has yet to be ordered. My mom comes to visit for mother's day, and we decide to check out the neighborhood garage sale. As we are walking up the driveway to one of the houses down the street, my mom starts going gaga over this table and chair set. I agreed it was cute, but I was trying to focus. I wasn't in the "table and chair" market. But when we got closer, I began to break a sweat. It was adorable-definitely.y an antique. "It's been in our family since the 1930's" , said the owner, who happened to be the sweetest old lady. My mom starts whispering all the things I could do with this set. "Look at the legs!", "Gina, you'll never find anything like this", "do you know how much this would cost in Chicago??". "OKAY!!!!".

I told my mom that if they took $40, I would bring it home to our furniture graveyard, thinking they would never accept that ridiculous offer.

They accepted.

I only took one "before" shot--but it was an orangey-tan wood, with a yellowish color on the detailed part of the chair. The table also had hand painted roses on it, covered with about 20 coats of varnish.

I think the end result came out great--huge thanks goes to my mother-in-law for sanding and polyurethane-ing this thing to death!!!