Every the thrifty gal, I decided that I could not justify spending $500 or more on the kind of patio furniture I kept eyeing. Inspiration struck when I was driving home with Adam one day. A neighbor a block over from us had a wooden table sitting out on the curb. I spoke to the man and we settled on $35 for the table and four chairs. They would need a little work, but I loved the idea of a farmhouse table-style setup on my back porch.
I consulted a few more-experienced woodworkers about my situation, and I went with the disassemble/sand/fill/sand/stain/reassemble/varnish method. My goal was to finish the table by the 4th of July. Here we go!
After sanding the table I realized that the original stain seeped so far down into the wood that no amount of sanding was going to completely erase the irregular areas of stain (and the nice man at Home Depot confirmed this when I described my dilemma to him). So, I took my original farmhouse table idea (you know, natural-color wood top with black legs) and decided to go all-ebony stain to cover up the patch areas.
Time to put it all back together!
The table still has some cracks in it, despite the filler and attempts to repair it. By also sanding the underside of the table I was able to make the sides slide out much smoother than they did originally. (I added some new felt under there, too, so the underside of the table would stop scratching the top of the slide-out sides!)
The chairs, unfortunately, are not going to make it. There are major cracks along critical parts of the chair that make them not even worth refinishing.
I'm on the lookout for some more chairs that will go well with my black wood, which may mean that I'll need to make some deeper, larger cushions, since the chairs that are my current frontrunner are shaped differently than these. The ones I like the most are black, iron chairs with a cute, geometric flowery pattern. I'll post the whole set when I actually get something!
