Old Workbench With A New Look: Guest

Suzanne at Meridian Road, found a great workbench and gave it a new look.  




My 100% free table is finished. For now. I'll probably change it again sometime within this lifetime. :)

It's raining again today. I was going to take this outside and do a for real photo shoot. But the garage will have to do.  And I am not happy with the photos.

Here is where we started.

All cobwebby and gross.

And here we are now.

Beautiful!

I stained the top.

It's about the same color as the underside of the table.

We had to use those brackets~one of the planks is cracked and this firmed it up a lot.

Since the grain on the wood is raised, it was easy to distress.

I didn't want to make this look like anything but what it is~a old workbench. I did want it to look better than it did when I found it, though.

Look how worn the edge of the table is.

The top is pretty scarred up. It's one of the things I love about it. I put one coat of satin polyurethane on the top. I didn't coat the botton. I'll tell you a secret~I didn't even really paint the bottom. That's primer.
I got the priming done, and I could still see a lot of the wood grain. It was like it the darkness of the wood was bleeding through. I really liked how it looked, and I like how flat the primer is, so I decided to leave it. If I want to paint over it later, it's just that much easier since it's already primed.

So here we have "before"

And "after"

Here's the really sad part. I had planned on putting this in our spare bedroom so I'd have a place for my sewing machine.  But it won't fit.  The door is too narrow.  So we either have to take off the top (and I really don't want to do that. For as old as it is, this table issturdy and I am reluctant to do anything to it that would make it less sturdy.)take out the whole door frame (ugh. Just thinking about that makes me tired), or use it somewhere else.

How about that!  Nice fix up huh?  I need to find one of these for my garage shop!