Rachel's table & my happy, lucky super score

Remember my lucky-duck friend Rachel that scored that amazing bench at a thrift store and handed it over to me for a face lift? Here's a picture of the finished bench to refresh your memory.

Well, friend Rachel spied a few other pieces that I've picked up and had me redo them to go with her shiny new bench.

This little night stand/side table is the last of her projects that just got completed. Here's what it looked like when I grabbed it from the thrift store.
Rachel brought me a can of the paint she wanted me to use, as well as a new pull for the drawer. Here's the table coated in the glossy burgundy paint (even though it looks kind of red in these photos.)

And here it is all done.


Rachel wanted some black on this piece, so I distressed it a bit then used a glaze (sometimes called "antiquing") on it.






If you're interested in learning how to do this treatment, there's a simple tutorial given here that is very clear and concise. I hope to be able to post photos of this along with the other items I did for her, arranged in her home, once I deliver them.

And now to show you my super lucky thrifty find that had me doing a happy dance all day. Okay, this weekend my husband and I rearranged the furniture in our house. Rearranged as in, we moved a giant 8 foot sofa and a huge love seat and a solid, heavy TV console upstairs and brought another sofa and enormous armoire downstairs, plus a couple of other smaller things.

It was major work. Our stairs go up, hit a little landing, then turn and go up the opposite direction.
It was really hard.
I perspired.
I was sore.
We gouged the walls with our giant furniture trying to negotiate the corner on those stairs, but we did it.
Here's a look around our living room before the shuffling began. (Sorry again for the lousy photos.)


Now, here's a peek at what our living room looked like this morning.
We no longer want it to be the hangout room because it's the room you walk into upon entering the house, and keeping it picked up was next to impossible with the kids' toys always being strewn around and such. So we moved the TV up to our bonus room and plan to use this room as sort of a quiet little spot to chat with guests or read.

Okay, on to what prompted this whole story. After moving out the big couch and love seat, I felt like the huge brown table/ottoman just didn't fit anymore. I wanted a coffee table. I real, wooden coffee table. I envisioned something rectangular with turned legs and a simple top, a lot like this table that I re-did for another friend.


Over the weekend I went to a few thrift stores, stalked Craigslist and today went to a few more thrift stores while the kids I ran errands. But I just wasn't finding what I wanted. I decided to check one last place downtown that I'd only ever been to once, but upon arriving found that they're not even open on Mondays.
Bummer.
As I backed out, ready to give up for the day, I had second thoughts and decided to visit the place next door. It's this weird, junky kind of store that has just stuff piled on top of stuff piled on top of stuff clear up to the ceiling. The aisles are about 18" wide and there's just so much that you really have to look hard to find anything. The one time I went in before I spotted some cute stuff but they were usually overpriced (in my opinion).

I briskly made my way around, stopping here and there to look closer at this or that, and soon found myself in the back corner of the store. As I turned to start heading out again I spotted the leg of something that looked like what could be a coffee table. But it was buried under piles of blankets and other stuff. Once I got the blankets off I knew immediately that this was what I wanted. It was perfect! Even better was that the price tag said $29.99 and not something completely out of my price range, which would have been heartbreaking. I admit, it wasn't a steal of a deal, but being that it was exactly what I was looking for, I was more than happy to pay it. So I asked the nice lady up front to help me unearth it and I hauled my treasure happily home. If I were capable of doing a back flip I probably would have.


It's just a really sturdy, substantial pine table with the turned legs I wanted and kind of a plank look to the top, and the scale is much better for the sofa that's in here now.





But it won't look like this for long. Ooooh, no. I have a vision. This is the perfect piece to do that painted legs, stained top treatment that I talked about. So imagine the legs painted ivory, distressed then glazed with dark brown to make them really pop, then the top stained a nice rich walnut color.
Yeah?
Oh, I can't WAIT!