Small Restyle

Both my husband and I are guilty of putting our feet on the coffee table on a regular basis. Even though we both think it's not the best habit - and my husband is pretty grossed out by the idea of feet where there is sometimes food. So, when we had the opportunity to take home a free footstool, we jumped - even though it wasn't exactly our style. 

I'm not sure what the stool looked like originally, but the purple fabric is covering at least one earlier version of upholstery fabric, the purple fringe trim was only held on with hot glue, and the gold paint on the legs was chipping to reveal unstained wood beneath. Even if gold and fringe were our style, the fringe was coming off in some places, and the chips in the gold were more 'whoops' than 'distressed.'

After testing it for a couple days to make sure it was the right height to use, and worth the loss of floor space in the living room, I was ready to give it a bit of a restyle.

Since the fringe and trim were only hot glued on, it only took a little bit of tugging on the unglued edges to peel all the fringe off. I thought it was an immediate improvement.

Separating the legs from the top took a few minutes - mostly as I struggled to find the right kind of tool to undo the screws. A little bit of sandpaper to the places where the glue hadn't quite come off and I was ready to spray paint.

Note - yes, I'm a little worried I should have sanded it all or used a better primer between the gold and the paint I used. But I'm not investing a lot of time or effort into furniture or decor right now, and we're usually not too hard on furniture, so I think we'll be okay - at least until we'd be looking to replace the coffee table with a larger ottoman/foot stool anyway, at which point this piece will likely move somewhere else or be given away. 

It was probably a little too windy to be spray painting:

but the breeze died down before I finished spraying.

I didn't want to spend any money on this project, so I used the paint we had left from other projects - a flat black, and a clear gloss finish. My gloss coat is a little less even than I would have liked, but that was completely user error. I was never very good at spray painting, and taking two years off (minus that one job for a stage prop last year) has not increased my skills.

After leaving it to sit outside the rest of the day, I brought it back inside, reassembled it, and left it to continue to dry the rest of the night. Yes, the spray paint claimed it would be dry in only 4 hours. But I like to leave spray painted projects outside as long as I can, and I wanted a little extra time before setting painted feet onto my floor. Fortunately, I found some sticky slider feet in a drawer of old supplies, so I didn't end up putting freshly painted feet on the rug.

I left the purple fabric in place for now. I'm not sure the purple quite goes with our orange/green chairs - although purple/green/orange are some of my favorite colors to combine. We're pretty constantly looking for another living situation (which is probably a post in and of itself), so many of the pieces of furniture are viewed as temporary place holders or things that will eventually get painted or re-upholstered to fit in another space depending on their quality. Most of the furniture we own was either given to us (like that chair and foot stool) or purchased second hand from thrift stores, garage sales, craigslist, or occasionally, rescued from the dusty, raccoon infested attic of my parents' barn. A generous soul might call our place eclectic, but I tend to think of it as barely controlled chaos.

Black fits out current furniture much better than the gold did - and I think it looks better with out the dings and scuffs showing quite as prominently. And best of all, both the cat and I have been enjoying having an extra landing space in the living room. My husband has yet to get a chance to use it.