April's coffee table

I've been working on a number of other custom order pieces for April. The first one was a coffee table. A new trend that I have seen around lately is the combination of an old wood look with aged metal. She picked up this table at a tag sale a few weeks back. It was the real deal - authentic raw wood and very aged, rusty iron. An aside note...ironically, she dropped it off right after my husband, Dave, had just accepted a job at IBM and imprinted in the wood says, "Property of IBM Corp." I'm not sure what it was used for, but it was obviously owned by IBM at some point and looks as if it has been around for many a day. It's a very cool piece. This is what it looked like when I got it.



April actually loved the piece the way it looked. However, it had layers upon layers of of paint, rust, and other things I didn't recognize on the metal and with little ones, you have to be careful with lead. So, I suggested that we re-do the legs and whitewash the top (brighten the wood and highlight the natural wood grain). I worked on the legs, sanding and using a wire brush to get all the loose stuff off and a bit of rust. I then primed it with a spray and used 2 different metallic paints on it. (My new favorite silver color is Krylon Satin Nickel). After this, I had to figure out a way to distress the legs to get them to look similar to the way it was originally. I sanded them heavily, used my beloved antiquing glaze and two types of stain...a walnut color and a cherry (to add a slight look of rust). Finally I white washed the wood on top. When I was done, my husband commented..."it doesn't look much different." I guess that's a good thing. I really liked it and I think my new favorite paint technique is white washing...I hope to try it out more in the future. Here is how she turned out.