a wild hair...

As Mark left for his semi-annual week-long conference in Chicago, I came up with the CRAZY idea to refinish some of our furniture!  It's something that's been driving me nuts and I thought I could have it ALL done by the time Mark got back home...[note the foreshadowing]

 as you can see Derek and Syd were a huge help with in the sanding process...we made our living room into a workshop...covering everything in our living room [cause it was too cold and rainy to do it outside] with old sheets to keep out the saw dust...

 I had to have a photo of where Kaiya had carved her name into one of our end tables - just as she was learning to write her own name...a sweet and precious memory!

And then -- I got a wild hair and decided to tackle the dining room table as well...trust me it needed it!

 the side with the work gloves is sanded and the other side is what it looked like before sanding -- gross!  You can barely tell the difference -- the finish was almost all gone!

 this is as I started the first coat of stain on our table...I was SO excited -- it made our table look brand new!

the piece on the left had no stain, the middle was letting the stain soak in for a bit and the piece on the right had one coat of stain... Mark got home well before completion of this "simple" project.  And there was ALOT of whining and complaining about the disorder -- sorry sweetie, what is it you always say?...oh yeah -- 'suck it up' -- never said it would be easy just said it would be worth it came to mind... 

more progress later...