I know that I said I was done discussing my DIY projects, but my brain has been permanently fried by craft paint and cheap craft paint at that. (A word of advice: don't buy the $.50 stuff at Michael's. You'll end up putting on more coats of paint than you have fingers.) Consequently, I'm going back on that promise and posting the pictures. Then I'm getting on the treadmill--there's nothing like watching an episode of Tyra about a man who gets sexual gratification just by having a 500-pound woman sit on him to get a person up and moving--and loading the dishwasher. Fun times on a Monday night.
Here is the decoupaged nightmare of a table before I redid it:
It looks that bad because at one point in the past I had tried unsuccessfully to pull off some of the decoupage on top. I had also attempted to strip the crackle paint finish with Ready Strip, that green paint stripper that they use to have on those late-night infomercials. Never buy it. Trust me when I say you'll be wasting your money and digging yourself a deeper craft hole. You may not be able to tell it in the picture, but the Ready Strip dried on the table and would not come off. Even after applying two other brands of paint stripper and using a heat gun on the green, dried up mess, it was still stuck on a good 25 percent of the table. I finally just had to paint over it.
Here is the after shot:
I'm not completely happy with it for several reasons. First, the places with the Ready Strip are bumpy. I would have preferred that they be smooth. Second, I had to finally give up on the brick red paint that I was using and switch to the more tomato red paint that I had used on the buffet. It was that or spend the next decade applying coats of brick red. Third, the light purple paint looked like it was going to be the same color as my wall color, only slightly lighter, when I looked at the swatch on the bottle. It wasn't so now there is a clashing issue. Fourth, the clear acrylic coat that I put over all the colors dried goopy in some places. Fifth, as you can see from this picture, the table is not the same height as my other side table.
It also doesn't match it. However, seeing as Target no longer sells that side table, and I was trying to save money by redoing what I had instead of buying new, it's just going to have to do.
Nevertheless, the project is finally done, and the lamp on top has been rewired. Consequently, as soon as I get through steam cleaning tomorrow, I can get caught up on other projects, like reading all of your blogs, returning EC drops, designing my nephew a header for the short story site he wants to start, redoing my Twitter background, and passing out the blog award that I should have passed out last week.
