The Saga of the Kitchen Table

In April of 2000, when we moved into our house in WVC, we had no kitchen table. We had a few chairs, and a high chair, and five kids, but no table to seat them around.

Within a few days Bruce found a table listed in the classified ads: dining room table, seats ten, $100. Well! That sounded great! We could have a table that would seat our whole family and a few friends! (Little did we know that within four years that table would only seat our family...)

As we needed them, we accumulated more chairs—none of them matching each other or the table, but they did the job. (In 2017 we got twelve chairs for a fabulous price at an auction. They don't really match the table, but they match each other.)

But the table! It was lovely. Two removable leaves, drawers in either end, and a beautiful cherry finish. This would last us our lifetime! Except...

...Except that the legs were wobbly—really wobbly. They wiggled like loose teeth whenever someone leaned on the table, or whenever we had to move it. Whenever they felt too rickety we'd crawl under the table with  wrench, tighten them up, and say, "We need to find a way to fix this!"

The other problem was the finish. After four or five years I noticed that the table always felt a little sticky. Hm. Was I just not getting it clean? Eight little kids, after all...  Then, one day Jason was scratching the finish right off with his fingernails. Oh! The finish was bad. (Helped along by our swamp cooler, I suspect.) Well, one day I would have to refinish it. In the meantime, I kept it covered with a tablecloth All. The. Time. I suppose we could have spent $1000 on a new table. Or $500 for one the same size in the classified ads. But it had been in our family for five ...ten ...twenty years— It's practically an heirloom! ;-)

top: the tablecloth that is only a few years younger than the table
center: The table is covered with that rubber, non-slip stuff that you put under rugs. I did this so that the tablecloth
wouldn't stick to the table. It really was that bad.
bottom: That is what the finish looked like. Some of it was scraped—or scraping—off.  The cloudiness is the old varnish.
And if you can see the little white freckles, they are where tiny
food particles got through the tablecloth weave, and
through the mat, and stuck permanently. 

On May 20, 2020, I was in the covid-19 doldrums; nothing sounded fun or interesting. As I was taking the tablecloth away to be washed I thought, Why don't I finally do this table? So I went to the hardware store that evening and got some furniture stripper. (Citristrip, by the way. Less stinky than other strippers, and works marvelously!) By morning I was completely uninterested, but in the afternoon I made myself apply the stripper to the tabletop, and the rest is history.

I had put a dropcloth under the table (lifting it made one of the legs fall off...) and applied the stripper—in the house—in the afternoon. That night I covered the table with another dropcloth and went to bed. I was still pretty unmotivated at this point, but the stripper had to be scraped off within 24 hours of application. Bruce helped me. :-)

We moved it into the garage where we scrubbed off
any residue with mineral spirits. It looks terrible!
See my purple cup on the table?

top: Bruce helped me sand the table. (And, yes, I did work on it
—a lot! It's just that I took all the pictures, too.)
The purple cup is still there, by the way.
bottom: half sanded—the first time over

There I am! And do you see my purple cup?

See my purple cup now? See the working refrigerator?
I was sad that my water got so warm while I worked
in the garage all day long. I did figure it out, eventually.

Look what we found under all of that old varnish!
Lovely.

At first I was going to stain and varnish the whole table. Then I decided to paint the skirt and legs white instead. I'm glad I did.

We flipped the table over so we could reattach the legs, and hopefully make them sturdier. While it was upside-down, we found some interesting things:

How did the gum get there? I'm sure it wasn't the old lady we bought the table from, and my kids weren't allowed to have gum in the house...  Ohh! I see!

But this was, perhaps, the most interesting discovery of all:

I took this picture while Bruce was looking at how to make the table legs more sturdy. Then we went to the store to buy the right size screws. We left the garage door open while we were gone.

When we got back from the store, the table looked like this. 

Did some random child come into our garage and scribble on the bottom of the table? That seemed unlikely, but when we looked at the first picture I'd taken, none of us could see any scribbling. This whole situation tickled my funny bone.

But, when I loaded the pics onto the computer...

The scribbling was there all along.
(I Photoshopped it out of the first pic so that you
could enjoy the mystery just as I did.)

Well, anyway, it was time to repair the legs.

This is how crooked the legs looked like most of the time
when the table was standing up.

This is why: Those bolts are the only things holding that leg in place, and they don't fit tightly into their slot. So if someone moves the table or leans on it, the legs rock from side to side. Eventually the nuts work loose, which makes the legs get even more wiggly, and then the nuts and bolts get looser, etc., etc., etc.

That is the slot I was talking about. There's almost 1/8-inch on either side of the bolts that go through the slot and into the leg. Besides that, the green box is outlining an empty space between the leg and its brace. No wonder the legs moved so much!
We filled the empty space (not the slots) with hardboard.

Bruce puts some screws into the legs...

...lots of screws! (ten per leg)
Of course, this means I will have to fill over the screws and repaint. That's OK. This table is sturdy now!

Well, after all of that, we only had to stand the table back on its legs and finish the top. One more light sanding, a coating of stain, and Bruce sprayed several coats of spar varnish on it. The varnishing took a long time because we had a week of high winds, cold weather (into the low 30s), and rain. So dirt was blowing into the garage, and it was too cold for the varnish to cure anyway. But, at last, it got the final coat of varnish just this past Tuesday, June 23, about a month after I started the whole project.

And here are the "befores" and "afters":

before

after!

You know, when I spend a month working on a project like this I almost forget how bad it was before I started. I know it was bad, but seeing the before and after pics reminds me just how bad. Wow!

before-ish
(This is after we started stripping the top—
I almost never remember to take "before" pics.)

after!

and after!

I am soooo pleased with the way it turned out!

But now...

...the chairs. 

Lovin' my lemon-lime wreath!
But... the chairs...

What do you think? Leave them black? Paint them to match the table? Every color of the rainbow?