Living room furniture transformation- good bye man cave tables!

So when Andrew moved in we had to decide which furniture to keep, his or mine... well I let mine go. :) His furniture was nice, but very masculine. Black leather couches, big dark heavy coffee tables and end tables. I learned to be content with them. Over the past 3 years the poor tables have been banged up, nail polish spilled on them... oh and just to let you know if you have never had it happen, the oil from the air freshener plug ins will totally strip the finish right off of wood. Anyhow they were looking pretty rough. We are planning for the new house and I would love to just have new furniture but it is not in the budget at the moment and honestly aside from the damage done to the surface of the tables there was really not a thing wrong with them. I decided it was time to give them a face lift.

These are the materials that I bought for the project (well I already had the poly acrylic on hand)

I started with the stripper, this stuff was pretty amazing. I just sprayed it on and waited and scraped it off. A couple of tips- make sure to spray it on pretty heavily you will get more off on the first try. Each table I did a better job on removing the old layers of stain and poly products. Also... I highly recommend not getting it anywhere on you, it burns like fire! 

This is what the table looked like after I stripped the top down. I totally forgot to take a complete before picture but basically the table was all that brown color. (excuse the mess of my work area- I collect things for projects, such as wine bottles)

After doing the prep work I used the PolyShades on the right on the flat surfaces on the top and bottom. The PolyShade is pretty cool it mixes the stain and polyurethane together! It took me two coats to get it to look the way I wanted it to. The interior flat on the left was a snow white used for the legs and base of the table. I used flat because I used antiquing glaze over it. 

This was during the staining process. I really should have taken more pictures but I was just excited to work on it!

After staining the top and bottom I painted the legs and base with the white flat paint then after it dried I glazed it. You pretty much paint it on the wipe it off. It fills in the gaps and grain and gives it that antique look. I then used polycrylic to seal it, I decided on that over the polyurethane because it does not turn yellow. (my cat photo bombed the picture!)

Whoohoo! It is finished! I like it so much better. It looks less heavy and less dark and will look awesome with my living groom design!