I hope you all had a wonderful Memorial Day weekend! Mine started out not so great with a cold/sore throat but I still managed to squeeze in my favorite project to date… my coffee table makeover!

Below is how it used to look. A boring old black table that was all scratched up. I’ve been wanting to paint it forever but just couldn’t decide on what I wanted to do. It’s probably not normal to sit and obsess about what color to paint your coffee table but I do that all the time with everything!

So I decided to just go for it.    I started by sanding the coffee table so my paint would adhere better.

I wanted to use some gold somewhere so I spray painted the bottom part

Then I rolled on my base paint color

After that had dried, I taped off the area that I was going to paint my pattern on

I used Frog Tape so don’t be alarmed by the green color!  I love this stuff.  Gives me the best paint lines every time

To start my herringbone pattern, I first found the center of my table and then used my tape to make a line.  I started with the right half of the table

Then I started measuring for my lines.  I wanted chunky lines so I made a mark at every five inches all around the perimeter of the right side and every five inches going up the middle.  (I wish I would have got a better picture of this part…) Then I took my first 5 inch mark from the middle line and my first 5 inch mark on the bottom and connected them which gave me my first diagonal line and then repeated the process every 5 inches.  Using these measurements this made my actual diagonal lines 3 1/2 inches wide  because of the angle (I know, weird right?  But that’s how it worked out)

So here’s what the right side looked like after I got all my tape on.  All the areas that you can see the base coat of paint I painted over white.  All the areas that are taped over will stay the base color.

To get a clean paint line here’s what I do.  I take my paintbrush and seal all the edges of the tape always painting away from the edge of the tape to seal it.  If you brush into the edge of the tape than the paint bleeds underneath.  After all the edges are sealed you can just roll over it with a paint roller.

Here’s what the right side looked like after I had painted it.  I let this sit to dry for a couple hours before I removed the tape to start on the left side.

My favorite part of painting is when I peel the tape off and have nice clean lines underneath 🙂

Then I started on the left half.  To make a herringbone pattern, you want to have opposite colors where the diagonal stripes meet up in the middle. 

So I taped off the left side opposite of the way I taped off the right side

And painted the left side (somehow this picture got turned upside down…oops)

I let the left side dry and then pulled all the tape off to reveal my lovely herringbone pattern!

There was just a couple spots that needed to be touched up and then I decided to get out my sanding block and just distress it up a bit

So here’s where my indecisiveness kicks in…… After I put the coffee table in my family room to see what it was going to look like, I decided there was just too much of the gold.  So Plan B- I decided to only the keep the bottom part of the legs gold and to paint the rest of the bottom half white.  So I taped everything off again, only exposing what I wanted to be white

I got out a can of white spray paint to reveal a white bottom half with just a touch of gold on the legs.  I liked this much better

It’s hard to tell in this picture but I did get out my electric sander again and on the lowest setting just lightly sanded the top to distress it a little bit.To finish it off I added a couple coats of Minwax water based polycrylic for better durability

In the end I was left with a beautiful new coffee table that doesn’t even remotely resemble the boring black table I started with.  I am in love with this piece and I’m glad I took the risk!  It was fun!!