New furniture!

Well, kinda.  I decided to give our old furniture a face lift.  I love the look of white on dark and vice versa.  The contrast is refreshing, so I thought I'd give it a try on two of our useful-but-darn-ugly furniture items: a lamp table and a coffee table.

Before shots:

I first had to sand everything.  I took pictures of the sanded pieces, but they don't look much different than the originals so I'm going to forego posting them.  The tops were slated to be white and the bottoms a dark stain.  I sprayed the tops first so that I wouldn't have to spray after already staining.  By the way, I'm a complete novice, so luckily Will was able to walk me through buying and using the products.  Later in the process I also put a call in to my MIL and received some great advice.  Here are some 'in progress' photos:

This is after paint, before stain.

After 1st coat of stain.  I used Minwax Dark Walnut.

Will took apart the coffee table, making the whole process much easier and worry-free.  Here is the sprayed table top:

An I-need-you-mom love for my legs:

Taking a break for a little cuddling. 

Here are the legs after stain.  Cans of beans were the props.  They were sprayed and dripped on and now they are first in line to be used from the pantry.  I only used one coat of stain on the legs since they were already pretty dark to begin with.  Another coat would've made them look almost black.

I left the lamp table plain, but I wanted the coffee table to have a little character.  I picked out a stencil from Hobby Lobby and, after some great advice from Patty (like practice on a box beforehand, which I did), got to dobbing a dark gray pattern onto the table top.  Here it is before removing the stencil. 

Here is the first half of the stencil done.  We measured and measured and measured again to make sure we had it straight and centered and even.  Try to get something straight on an oval.  There are no corners from which to measure so we spent almost as much time measuring as I did stenciling. 

We did well, though.  It's straight.

Before doing the other half.  I kinda like the negative look - it's pretty nifty.

Final product after days and days of waiting and drying and waiting some more because of all the humidity and a rainstorm in the middle of the process.

The table top from above:

The final product in some bad lighting:

They both got a few coats of spray lacquer to protect the surfaces. 

And now here are the before and after shots so you don't have to scroll all the way up

and back down to see them.

I love them.  They are so much more current than the previous versions of themselves.  They were a fun project and turned out well for being my firsts.  I hope to do some more furniture updating in the future.