Old End Table to Playroom Table

When we got married, we got literally almost all of our furniture from Target.  It was cheap and we were poor and I loved it.  Fast forward almost 10 years and that furniture has seen quite a lot of "love" from us and our now 4 kiddos.  The end tables that we had gotten for our living room were in particular pretty rough.  This one had scratches all over the top and was just a mess.  But I just couldn't bring myself to get rid of it when we needed a table for the playroom.  

Ah, the playroom - this is the place where I get to really play with color in my house :)  I haven't gotten too crazy yet, but I have plans, my friends!  PLANS!!

The items I first chose that set the color scheme were the fabric storage bins I made for their cube shelves - yeah, still need to do a tutorial on those, but here's one I did for the stuffed animal storage where you can see the bin fabric beneath - LOVE!

So, this is the table BEFORE:

Like I said - pretty rough.  I had actually sanded it already in these pics, but honestly, it's not much different than it was before I sanded.

Anyhoo…I went to Lowe's and found a sample pot of paint that I fell in love with and it was just the right amount for this little table.

I used a small cabinet roller and first put a coat of Zinsser Bin 123 Primer (my fave) and then painted the latex paint on top of that.  Then I used some lighter blue paint and some stencils that I found at Michaels that were little speech bubbles.

They didn't quite "pop" enough, so I used a black sharpie to outline them.  

I had to figure out what to put in the speech bubbles.  I chose scriptures that I thought would help my kiddos the most and copied a font I liked from Word - just eyeballed it.  

After the paint was dry, I used this clear coat polyacrylic just on the top using the sock method mentioned in this tutorial.  All kinds of stuff has been poured on this table and liquids don't seem to affect it at all, so that's wonderful news!!

I love the way it turned out, and apparently so did my 18 month old, because he tried to add writing of his own ;P  Oh well!  That's why it's in the playroom!!