The thing about owning a fixer-upper is it’s easy to spend all your money on it. Which is fine. We have a budget or whatever and we pretend to stick to it. But we moved from an 800 sqft apartment to a 1,445 sqft house (it’s important to note that while living in said apartment I read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo and I got rid of a LOT of stuff) so there’s a large amount of empty space in this new house.

Somehow I decided I wanted two matching end tables and I wanted them to be pretty. I also wanted to spend less than $60.

Finally, after weeks of searching, I found these matching side tables on a local sale group on Facebook for $50 for the set:

There are several of these groups in my area and they work just like Craigslist. The advantage to using these FB “for sale” groups is that I’d been checking CL obsessively for weeks and nothing in my price range was coming available. Lately, I’ve been feeling that CL is a little overpriced anyway.

These tables are fine but not great. I think I overpaid by spending $50 on both but I really liked the bones. I liked the sort-of-french-style legs. I did not like the table top, however, and I did not like the idea of simply painting the whole thing. When I flipped the tables over it looked as though the tops were solid wood. I thought I could remove the tops, flip them over, cut them down to a square, sand and stain, and reattach. Unfortunately, I quickly discovered that the tops were actually compressed wood with a paper-thin layer of real wood encasing it.

Disappointment. Now what?

Then I remembered the paneling we had removed from the kitchen. For giggles, you need to see what our kitchen looked like when we bought this house:

Grandma kitchen alert. It’s nostalgic, yes. But not lovely. Day 1 of being new homeowners meant removing the paneling, wallpaper, and linoleum. I saved some the wallpaper to frame a small piece to remember where we started. The paneling was a beautiful hardwood which I also saved. The linoleum was taken to the dump the same day by my father and my father-in-law but still gives me nightmares.

This is the wood we removed from the house. A lot of it is trim which is going back in once the floors are finished in the kitchen and dining room, but the paneling had no future purpose. The part of the paneling which had been facing out had been shellacked and poly’d and was a sickly and shiny shade of orange, but the backside had been left raw. It was perfect.

I selected the pieces I wanted to use and removed the nails:

which was easy because they’re finishing nails. I simply used my channellocks:

to pull the nails through the back of the wood. I did get a little bit of splintering action but nothing too bad.

The paneling was bit too long so I shortened each piece by about 4 inches. After that, I simply glued the pieces together using wood glue.

While I waited for the glue to dry I got started on the table legs. It took several coats of spray paint. SEVERAL. I had to buy a second can.

When the glue was dry I sanded A LOT, stained them a natural color, and used a finishing wax to top it off. I love using finishing wax on tabletops. It doesn’t have the shiny quality that poly does (which I hate) and it leaves wood feeling smooth and soft.

Then it was just a matter of reinforcing the table top with two crossbars (which I do not have a picture of), and screwing the top to the legs through the holes left behind from removing the top in the first place.

And here we go:

One of either side of the couch! I can’t show you a picture of the whole wall because these tables are really the only redeeming quality at the moment. We haven’t even painted the walls yet. Please stay tuned on that, though.

Total cost of the project: tables $50, spray paint: $10. Everything else I either found or already owned.

For updates on the house project, follow me on Pinterest.

Peace.

SLB