Boring Coffee Table Gets a Bit of a Face-lift

I have a room I rent out on occasions and I'm always looking for ways to make this space more appealing and at the same time 'up-cycle' some of the dreary furniture that I currently have in my home.

I have a rule - look at the shape of the piece. Ignore the ugly yellow pine or really ugly dark wood or veneer finishes. Usually these are pretty solid items of furniture and well worth the effort of the up-grade.

This was a very plainly cut, very sturdy solid pine coffee table. I started the project by mixing up a chalk paint. I used the same colour paint that was used on the walls (Dulux Silk Emulsion in Natural Hessian) - I use 4 parts paint to one part chalk and 1 part water.

Time: 2 Hours Cost: $28 Difficulty: Easy

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I chose a montage of decoupage tissue papers with similar colours on them - different tones of brown & reds. This room is brown & cream with accents of grey and red (sounds weird, I know, but it works!) I started by ripping the pieces up into different sized shapes and then stuck them down with a watered down white wood glue.

I was quite pleased with this result, however, it did look a bit too bright for the room.

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I toned the whole piece down by covering it all with some Dark Wax from Annie Sloan. It's now a really colourful and interesting addition to this quite dark room.

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Here is the finished product in the room - I think it worked really well. I love the feeling of satisfaction I get from taking a previously un-loved piece and giving it a new lease of life!

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Materials used for this project:

• Dulux Silk Emulsion in Natural Hessian   (Amazon)
• Chalk (Calcium Carbonate)   (Amazon)
• Dark Wax   (Annie Sloan)
• Decoupage papers   (Hobby Craft)