I do not need to go shopping for anything. I have plenty of things at my house to work on. Yet, I see an estate sale listed in the newspaper classifieds and I have to take a look. Friday I left work around 2 PM planning to make a super quick stop at just the one estate sale I saw listed and then head home to work on a post for today. I was looking for one or two small things at a cheap price.
After going about two miles past the location of the sale, I turned around and once again drove past the house in the opposite direction. Again, I turn my car around and drive 500 feet back to where I thought I saw a tiny sign posted on a tree. I obviously had found the location of the sale, but apparently when someone lists a question mark as the closing time, that time falls before 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
By this time, I was determined to find a sale and buy something whether I needed it or not. I had seen a sign at the post office advertising the sale of all sales. Sounds like the place for me, right?
I have to give the homeowner credit for the time she had to have spent writing catchy signs and posting them on the road to her house.
You won't be sorry....
It's worth it....
You're not far now...
The signs kept claiming that I was almost there, which in hindsight should have been warning enough for me to turn around. But I kept believing. Finally, fifteen minutes outside of town in the middle of nowhere just as I'm ready to turn around, I find my sale of all sales.....which was another quarter of a mile off the road on a narrow dirt path full of holes.
I was not really excited by what I found (or maybe I was just too exhausted to care anymore). But then, just as I was ready to leave, I found this table. I did not need another piece of furniture. I do not have room to store another piece of furniture. I had said earlier in the day that I would not be buying another piece of furniture.
It had no price. The prices were a little high on the things I had looked at. I told myself I'd ask the price and if it was $5 or less, I'd buy it. (I just knew that she was going to tell me $10 for this table).
Obviously, since I'm sharing pictures here you can assume it was $5. What are the chances?
I actually bought it on the condition that I could even get it into my two door Ford Focus. Again, obviously, it fit. If the legs would have been any taller or the table top any longer it wouldn't have happened. There was no way I was going back for this table.
This has to be the trashiest piece of furniture I've ever bought. I'm not sure why I find such beauty in peeling veneer and broken boards, but I do. I enjoy the process of turning junk into a thing of beauty. There is plenty of beauty to be made out of this piece.
It was originally a table for holding antique radio speakers. I'm not sure of the age or the brand. But isn't it pretty? Or at least has the potential to be pretty?
In it's previous life, the stand was for holding speakers to a radio that sat on the top. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this, but that is what I could find searching on Google.
Honestly, I think that this table had already gone through a little DIY. If you remember the picture of the inside of the table, I showed that there was a portion cut out of the inside. Once I thought about it, I decided that the table was probably used as a desk at one point. It could have sat facing into the room so that you could still see the fancy front. Just a thought, but it is the only idea that I could come up with about why someone would cut a chunk out of the shelf.
The process of bringing it back to life started by removing the veneer on the tabletop which wasn't too hard since most of it was up all on it's own. It was too far gone to be repaired, so removing it was the only option. It exposed a top made of a slab of wood with three tongue and grove pieces of trim. Since the entire piece is painted, it doesn't bother me to be a little rustic.
The only really difficult part of this entire project was repairing the veneer on the scroll work. I used wood glue and held everything together with binder clips until the glue dried. (I seriously use binder clips more for DIY projects than office work!) Then the holes were filled in with wood putty.
There were random nails and thumbtacks all over the piece, so those were all removed. Since there was already a lot of holes and nicks in the stand, I didn't bother filling in the holes. Remember, I'm going a little bit rustic.
Then the everything was sanded, painted, distressed and waxed
. And the project was done!
So what do you think?
My favorite parts are the decorative trim and amazing legs.
In case you don't remember, here is the before of my stand:
Normally, I don't keep much of what I make, but for now, this piece is staying with me. It is going to sit at the bottom of my basement steps. I plan to put a new (continuous) shelf on the inside so that I can store items that I don't need to get to regularly. It might as well be functional while it is being beautiful!