Lacey End Table Tutorial

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I was thinking of using coral as an accent colour in the office (read more on that here). Before I commit to it totally, I thought I'd try a small piece of furniture to see if I like the colour enough to move forward. I redid an old table that we had hanging around, and with a little paint turned it into this:

I started out with an Ikea LACK table - yup, the cheapest table at Ikea.  I had one hiding in my basement that was left over from my years as a student, but if you don't have one they are only $9.99 at Ikea.

I removed the legs from the top and gave all pieces a coat of spray primer.  I like Rust-Oleum Painter's Touch, but any brand will work.

To save money on the top coat of paint I went to Home Depot and bought a Behr tester pot for $4.99.  Home Depot is great for this because they will mix any colour for you into a tester pot.  I chose to go with  Behr's Indian Dance, which is a bright coral.

I then used a foam roller to apply 2 coats of the paint to the table and legs. The work bench worked great for holding the legs so I could paint all sides at once and didn't have to keep running back out to the garage to the flip the legs around.

Now comes the fun part - the lace.  I found a piece of lace at Fabricland in the discount section for only $2 a meter.  You can't beat that!  It was fairly Grandma-ish, but since I wasn't going be using the actual lace in the end, I figured it was ok.  Fabricland has some really nice summer lace in right now, but it's quite expensive ($20 a meter expensive - too much).  If you tackle this project in the fall you might be able to catch the summer stuff on sale.

I cut the lace a bit bigger than the table top and then placed it on top, wrapping the ends underneath so it stayed tight.  If you have a short piece of lace you could always tape it to the sides instead of wrapping it around, but I wasn't patient enough to let the paint dry enough to do that!

I had some high gloss white spray paint left over from another project, but if you don't have any hanging around, you could use the primer again so that you don't have to buy another can of spray paint.  The primer will just give a more matte finish instead of a gloss.  The tricky part here is to spray from directly above and to try and be as even as possible.  Unfortunately I was using the very last bits of a can of spray paint and it started to sputter on me just before I was done.  The sputtering caused some blotchyness, but since this table is going to have stuff on it (no empty tables in our house) I think you won't even notice it in the end. Before the spray paint dried I carefully removed the lace, trying not to smudge any paint in the process.

I then touched up the sides with the coral again since some of the white spray paint drifted, and then reattached the legs.  

Voila - a custom lace table that doesn't look anything like its original self.

What do you think of the colour? I like it, but think it might be a bit too peach/orange for the space we have. I am thinking I'll go a bit darker for the rest of the room and maybe use Mesa Sunrise or Fireglow for some of the art projects.