Pottery Barn rustic

My latest home improvement project has been refinishing our dining room table.

This farm house style table was in our house growing up. My parents had it made many, many moons ago and we ate dinner at this table.... as a family, every single night.

Fast forward 10 or so years and I am now the owner of this table. Farm house style is not exactly my thing, but Pottery Barn rustic is definitely my thing. (Let me back up and say, one of my brothers started to sand it a couple of years ago, and never finished. Hence the sanded top and unsanded benches.)

I spent a lot of time trying to decide how I wanted the table to look. Did I want to paint it black? Did I want to stain it? Did I want to distress it? I finally decided on a PB rustic type of look.

My first step was to sand the entire thing. Growing up I can remember my brothers and I would lay on these benches and do our homework. And if you looked close enough, you could see the intentions of years and years of math problems, spelling words and science equations. As much as I love this little memory, those little marks are now all gone.

After sanding everything, I primed the entire thing. By this point I knew I wanted to paint it white, so I had to make sure the dark red legs were nice and primed.

After the priming, I applied the first coat of white paint. The next step is the fun part. I painted all of the edges turquoise. At this point Mr. thought I was nuts. What? A white and turquoise table? Just wait and see.

After the turquoise, I rubbed a white taper candle all over the turquoise areas and then did 2 more coats of white paint.

After all of the white paint was nice and dry, I lightly sanded over the areas I had painted turquoise.... this gave the table the rustic look I was going for. But, now the rest of the table looked too new, so I went ahead and distressed the rest of the table with a fine grit sandpaper.

The last step was to apply 2 coats of satin polycrylic. We plan on using this table all the time, so I needed to protect the surface from water spots and cleaning products. I sanded in between coats to give it a smoother finish.

So... here is the finished product! I love the way it turned out. This was my first real venture in refinishing furniture, and since I have completed this I have already refinished another piece for our living room!

I am going to use one bench and store the other one. I have a set of 4 antique chairs that I am in the process of recovering, the 2 chairs that are currently there are from other rooms in the house. We needed additional seating for Christmas dinner.