Refurbishing a Dining Table on a Budget

Our growing family has outgrown our little round table that sits in our breakfast room. I love this table, but with 3 kids and guests constantly visiting, it’s nearly impossible to get everyone around this table comfortably.

I was searching Facebook marketplace for a few weeks looking for a great “fixer upper” table and I finally stumbled upon this one.

They were asking $100 for it but I got them to go down to $75, and I bought it. This table also came with 3 chairs which I wasn’t planning to use. I ended up selling my round table and the 3 chairs from the new table and made $75 on all of that, so I actually broke even and wasn’t even out of pocket any money for the new table! Winning! The only thing I had to pay for was the paint/stain supplies. A lot of the supplies I already had, but I think I ended up spending about $50 on all the supplies.

The goal for this project: strip the top of the table to get to the original wood color, chalk paint the bottom part of the table and then seal it with several coats of Polycrylic. Step 1: wipe down the table with a wet washcloth.

Step 2: Apply the citristrip to the top then scrape it off. Now, here’s the deal about this stripper: You can’t let it sit as long as it says on the back of the bottle, especially if you live where it’s hot. They recommend waiting 30 minutes, but since I did this in the summer and I did it outside it dried way faster than it I would have had I done it indoors. So instead of waiting 30 minutes, I should have waited more like 20.

Since I waited longer than I should have it was quite the pain to remove the stripper. It dried on and was really sticky and so tough to scrape off.

I had to use this metal brush scrapper on the tough spots and around the edges of the table.

Step 3: Sand it. I ended up just sanding a lot of the stripper off and I wonder if it would have been easier to just sand it to begin with and not even deal with the stripper. Ya live and ya learn I guess.

That was definitely the hardest part and I think I can still feel my hand vibrating from the sander, but after all that work I could finally see the original wood and I was loving it! Step 4: Sand lightly, then chalk paint the bottom of the table. So after that, I flipped the table over, sanded it lightly, and started chalk painting the bottom of the table. Flipping it over made it much easier on my back. I went with a Kitlz white chalk paint from Walmart and I love it! It’s a great white color and sticks to painted wood so well. The thing I love about chalk paint is it sticks to just about any surface so you really don’t need to sand or prep the surface beforehand. To apply the chalk paint I just used a paintbrush.

I ended up applying 3 coats in order to cover all the stain.

Step 5: Distress using a sander. So after I chalk painted the bottom of the table I distressed it using an electric sander and then a sanding block in some places. There’s really no rhyme or reason to this, just go with your gut. And I recommend not distressing too much at first. You can always go back and distress it more, but it’s really hard to redo what you’ve already distressed. That was my mistake. I went crazy with the distressing and ended up going back over a lot of the distressed parts with paint and then it was a bit lumpy in places. But I don’t think anyone will notice that except me.

Step 6: Stain the top. Once that was all done the next step was to stain the top of the table. I love Minwax’s early American stain, but I don’t like the orangey tone it has to it so I mixed a little gray stain in with it, tested it on an old piece of wood, and it came out the perfect color without any orange.

I used an old T-shirt to apply the stain. This was definitely the easiest part. I went back with a second coat of stain on the edges of the table. Step 7: Sand and Poly. Once the stain was good and dry I lightly sanded the table, wiped it down with a wet washcloth, then applied a coat of matte Polycrylic. This is so important especially for a table that’s going to get a lot of wear and tear. DO NOT skip this step even if you buy the stain that claims to have Poly mixed in with it. It’s not the same! Do this step!

You need several coats of Poly to seal the wood and make it a durable surface. I repeated the sanding and Poly step 3 times for the top of the table letting it dry about an hour in between and I applied it using a T-shirt. For the last Poly coat though I used a brush to apply it.

for the bottom of the table I only applied one coat of Poly since the bottom wouldn’t be getting as much wear and tear. The great thing about wood is you can re-Poly it anytime it starts looking rough. The wood ended up being more beautiful than I even expected and I’m loving the rich color!

I let it dry for several hours before bringing it inside. All done! We are loving this table and it’s already been through a week of wild boys eating at it and it’s held up perfectly.