A Little Cafe

Okay, maybe not the whole cafe, but we do have a new cafe table.  We were in the market for a little table that would fit in the corner of the sun room behind the door.  Something that was small enough for the space, but would be large enough for us to actually use for sipping coffee/tea or even small meals.

Then as luck would have it, we stumbled across one at our local thrift store.  J's mom and I had been out shopping for the housewarming party all day and decided to stop in the thrift store up the road from our house, just because.  And low and behold, there she was.

This is the picture that J got as soon as I saw her.

It's a pretty crappy picture, but I was excited when I saw her.  And you can see J's mom in the back trying to more things so that we could get a better picture.  And they only wanted $15.  It needed a little TLC, but it was structurally sound, so I didn't even wait for J's response.  I just took the tag up to the front desk and packed her in my car.

She's been sitting in the sun room for a few weeks now, but now we're at the point where we have to decide on what color we want to go with.  It's going to go out in the sun room where the walls will be bright white and the carpet will be a neutral color, either tan or grey (or we might just install hard wood or tile).  If it was up to me, I would probably just paint them ORB and then dress her up with a little table cloth or something.  But we both decided we wanted to do something a little different.

So we decided to go with two different colors; a hammered bronze and celery.  Okay, so the hammered bronze is pretty close to ORB, but it's has a nice texture and isn't as dark.  And the celery is just so pretty.

The chairs have a inlay of glass in them.  It's a nice little touch.  I was a bit scare about using a green as an accent color, but after thinking about it, I think it will work, fingers crossed.  I guess if it doesn't we can just paint over it.

Can we paint yet?  Not quite, I need to clean all the old paint that is chipping and pealing.  So I got out the handy wire brush and various scrapers and went to town on the old paint.  For the most part this set was in pretty good shape, only one chair had a lot of chipping paint.

After scraping as much paint off as I could and then using the wire brush to finish up, I washed them to get rid of all the dust from scraping and all the years of dirt.  I wanted  to make sure they were very dry, so I'm letting them dry overnight.  Then they should be ready to paint tomorrow.

Well they should be ready for paint, but that's if I'm feeling better.  I have come down with a lovely cold/flu.  I only made it two hours at work this morning before I had to come home stopping only for some meds.  Now I'm just hoping that I caught this early enough so I can get back to working on this little project.  I can't wait to see her all painted.  :-)