My New Favorite Sewing Table

I can’t believe I finally found time to sit down and put together a blog post! I tell ya, February is a crazy month around here. I have three birthdays and four Valentines day parties to get through. Breathing is optional.

No seriously.

Just check out a little of the cake magic that has been occurring in our neck of the woods recently:

Thank goodness for my local YMCA because I’m going to need them on a daily basis after I finish plowing through all the sweet treats that are currently residing in our house.

I was originally going to do a food post today but decided on another home post instead. You see, I’ve been working on refinishing a sewing table for nearly a year now. I know we all have a project like this. It’s one of those jobs that sounds like a piece of cake (no pun intended but hey, I’ve got a piece or two if you’re hungry!) but ends up being a much bigger effort than you realized.

I found this table at a flea market last February and picked it up for $50. It’s an English Pub table from the 1950’s. It’s sturdy, it’s adjustable in size and I like how it looks. Here’s a few pictures of the original. How difficult could it be to fix it up, right?

Well, 10 months later, I can say that it definitely required more effort than I had originally thought. I have learned that I am not qualified to “re-veneer” anything. I have also learned that sanding in tight spaces is a real pain in the “you-know-what”. Challenges aside, I’m still pretty pleased with the way it turned out.

If you’ve never removed veneer before, get ready for a project. I scoured through all the blogosphere articles I could find looking for tips and tricks on how to effectively get it off, but my veneer obviously didn’t read the manual because it was happy right where it was and it didn’t want to move. I used wet towels with steam and hot irons (the most suggested method) and in some places it worked wonders. Other spots though, were not so forgiving.

And then there was the sanding. Flat spots? Bring it on. Turned beautiful legs with lots of tight dark corners? Not nearly as straightforward. I did finally track down some special sanding blocks that had sloped edges to help get into the tough to reach spots. Even with my fancy sanding tools, I still exerted enough effort to warrant an extra bite or two of cake at the end of the day.

So I’ve concluded that I am most definitely not a professional table refinisher. I’m OK with that. If it’s functional and somewhat pretty at the end of the day, I’ll consider it a win. So what do you think? Was it worth the effort?