Y’all. I made something.

I started with a table base and four chair frames and an idea.

Once upon a time this was my grandparents’ patio furniture. I spent many an hour in their backyard in Albuquerque sitting at it. Family dinners. Bowls of ice cream on warm summer nights. Dying Easter eggs with my cousins. Playing with toys. It was a great setting for family time. I was lucky to have it handed down to me. But it had seen better days. So I trashed the tabletop and cut off the cracked vinyl straps from the chair. Then I had to figure out what to do from there.

I started with the table. Mostly because my mom discovered a huge MDF circle in the back of her storage shed. No clue where it came from but it was almost exactly the same size as the original tabletop. I knew I wanted to do some sort of mosaic pattern with wood for the top so I started playing around.

This is what I came up with. That’s all old wood I’ve salvaged. Most of it came from a friend who got a new fence. Some of it is from pallets too. It’s a random, kinda ratty mix of wood.

But after a TON of sanding and a TON of polyurethane it is gorgeous. Gorgeous I say!

To finish the top I wrapped the edge with aluminum tape. It’s super sticky and easy to work with. I did three layers because the tape is fairly thin and fragile. You can also see that I painted the chair frames and the table base. Purple. Because purple is awesome.

Next I had to tackle the chairs. I couldn’t do a mosaic pattern with them so I settled for simple wooden slats, once again using old fence boards. Here I’m laying them out to make sure they’ll hold up to someone sitting on them.

Once again, I sanded and sanded and sanded then put coat after coat of poly until I could finally bolt the finished boards on to the chair frames.

I’ve gotta say, I’m pretty darn proud of how this project ended up. The wood adds good weight to the table and the chairs so they hopefully won’t get tossed around by our Texas Panhandle winds. There’s so much poly on them that they clean up with just a damp rag.

Hopefully I’ll be making a lot more memories with this furniture. Dinners with friends. Writing stories while watching the world go by. Sipping a Chilton on a summer evening after work. All with a table and chairs clad with trash wood. Just goes to show you that, with some time and hard work, you can save the things other people would have sent to the junkyard.

Happy creating, everyone!

~Elise