Goldilocks and the Three Coffee Tables

Our front door is like a revolving door for coffee tables.  The tricky part about having a small ranch-style house is that our living room serves as living room, of course, but also entryway, hallway, and general center of chaos.  Thus, we haven't yet been able to find the perfect place to put both our feet and our drinks, without totally blocking traffic flow, or cluttering up the already-dark space with more heaviness.

The tables we have tried turned out a bit like the Goldilocks story.


The first one was too big.  Beautiful, but too heavy.

The second one was too soft.  Comfy, but looked shabby with our new couch.

The third one was juuuust right.

Well, it's good enough for now.  


The new little table is from this store in Forsyth, GA, where they collect and sell furniture and accessories from hotels and businesses when they remodel.  The store is pretty cool - hundreds of headboards, rows of armoires, thousands of lamps.  The mirror section makes me drool.  Most of the stuff is either too ornate (from the Ritz) or too big (from office buildings) or too gaudy (from Disney resorts) for us, but it's still fun to look.  It's all pretty cheap for what it is.

Luckily, we saw this table at Kacy's mom's house, and she pointed us to Forsyth (thanks for the inspiration Barb!).  It was the perfect size for what we needed.  The table came in bright white, with blue crosshatches.  It was pretty, but didn't quite fit in with our color scheme.

So I busted out my fancy Dremel tool that I got for free through work (and fell in love with it in the process!) and sanded this baby down.  Um... it took... a while....

But once I got into all of the nooks and crannies, I was able to paint it a less-harsh offwhite, and make the crosshatches a camel brown.  I used Krylon acrylic latex enamel paint (the offwhite) and regular $.99 craft paint for the brown.  I'm quite pleased with the result!

The hotel furniture store is pretty cool.  Kacy got a great armoire there for super-cheap.  I think it would be a great resource for a big kid's room - most of the Disney stuff is themed, so your kid could have the coolest bunk bed in town, for a cheap prices, and minimal work by you!  


ps - I've mentioned how I hate my camera.  I'm pretty sure it knew I posted about that, and it has been slowly disintegrating it's own lens in retribution.  That, and I take all photos in our cave of a house after dark, since it gets dark at 7pm (what the heck daylight savings time!).  So, just pretend I took all of my photos with a Blackberry, and give me a pass for the next month or two!


pps - pretend that I actually took the time to clean the glass table top before photographing.