Table Refinish - FAIL!

One should never let one's self get too sentimental about objects. That's what happened to me with this table. I love this table.  We had so many good times around it as children.

As a child, it never occurred to me what a tiny table it was, but when we were looking for a table for our little 800 square foot condo, this one seemed like it could be the perfect solution.  The leaves fold in to make it just right for a party of two, and four people can sit there with the leaves extended. You could even put a chair on either side and get 6 around it in a pinch.

The table has been in our basement for more years than I'd like to reveal and the surface was scratched from years of use as a craft table.

I thought I could dab some paint on it quickly and have a nice retro table.  Wrong.

First, I took the chrome legs off and sanded them.

I wanted to make them look like stainless steel to go with our appliances rather than re-chroming them. The first coat of paint ran and dripped and just looked awful, so I set them aside and started on the top.

I cleaned and painted the base first. So far, so good. It was made of wood so the paint adhered nicely.

The top was a different story. First I taped the black edges and then tried to decide what to do about the stripes. I cut the painter's tape into tiny strips using a rotary cutter and taped all of the black stripes. It was a painstaking process.

When I finished, I spray painted the table using appliance epoxy. It looked great!

I peeled off the tape exposing the black stripes. They were a little dull but not too bad.  This is where I should have stopped.

But, unwilling to leave well enough alone, I decided to paint the black stripes. I started taping the area around the black stripes, but the tape was too wide.

I didn't want to do the painstaking rotary cutter method of cutting the tape to size so I thought I could take the large roll of painters tape and cut off a section of it using the band saw. This was a fiasco. First, the tape roll was too big to fit under the band saw. Tony jumped in at this point to help because he doesn't trust me to use power tools.  We squished the tape roll into an oval shape and held it with a zip tie. When we tried to cut it using the band saw, it tried to spin and jumped out from under the saw. It seemed dangerous, so we decided to resort to using hand tools.  We tried a variety, but none of them would cut the roll of tape. I wound up with a ragged edged cut on one side which was fine, but what wasn't fine was the dirt that had adhered to the straight edge.

I taped off the white part but wasn't confident of the taping skills so rather than spray paint the black lines, I decided to use a a paint brush to paint them. The dirt on the edge of the tape allowed the tape to bleed onto the white paint, but I still thought I could touch it up.

When I pulled the tape off, though, it pulled the white paint off with it. I tried to sand the areas where the missing paint was but this proved rather pointless.

I did the rotary cutter method to cut the tape into strips to cover the black stripes again and repainted the white part using a paint with primer in it.  This time, the tape didn't stick as well and white overspray got on the black lines. AARRGGHH...

I used an artist's paintbrush to try to touch up the black lines but my hand is not as steady as it used to be so the black lines are a bit wavy.

The final product looks okay from a distance, but don't look too closely!