"What is a fold over table?" you might ask. Well I didn't know either until I came across this little gem. I picked it up at a garage sale for $10. I thought it was a great deal, that is until I went to refinish it. A fold over table is a table that can be converted to either a coffee table or a dining table by this ingenious mechanism. You just pull it up, slide it over, and fold over the top. Pretty cool huh?
Then the headache started. I thought I would just refinish the top on this and then use some Howard's Restore a Finish on the base. So on a nice hot day last summer my husband removed the top and I slathered on some heavy duty stripper to it. I let the stripper work it's magic for 15min. and tested it. Nothing! So I left it on for another 15min. Still Nothing! I tried a different stripper. STILL NOTHING! When I say nothing, I mean it didn't even faze it. Then my husband took over. He started with the quarter sander. Nope nada. Then he got out the belt sander. This finally started taking off some stuff. We finally figured out that the finish was probably resin. I forgot to say that the reason the top needed redone was because the finish was all cracked and alligatored. So after days of sanding and a few heavy duty sanding belts we were finally down to veneer. Yep, this beautiful wood was veneer over press board. By this time neither of us wanted to look at it for awhile, so off to the storage shed until winter.
Fast forward to February - After two wonderful weeks in Maui, and with the island attitude of "no worries" still in my heart, I decided to take on this beast again. Now I know I should have just used some ASCP to paint it, but I wanted to use up some of my old paint. So I primed it with some Zinsser, custom mixed some dark grey latex, mixed in my homemade chalk solution and painted away. Three coats later, a little Martha Stewart coffee glaze and some polyurethane and it was ready to put back together. My husband rebuilt the soss hinges that hold the two pieces together because these are really expensive and hard to find. I also painted two chairs I found to match and used fabric from an old pillow to cover the seats (you can see the remaining pillows on the sofa).
So here it is, both down as a coffee table, and lifted as a dining table. Great thing is that it sold in a few weeks and now I don't have to think about it anymore!
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