Turning Pine Dining Tables From Frumpy To Fabulous
Dining tables are often right at the centre of our home & social lives, providing a place to relax with breakfast in the morning, & somewhere to sit with friends & family to dissect the day in the evening, as well as providing a place for children’s homework, bill paying & maybe even crafts & hobbies.
Dining tables for family life need to be be able to withstand the rigours of day to day family life, so have to be fairly robust, not to mention easy to clean & sturdy. They also need to be safe if you have small children around as younger children can injure themselves quite badly on the sharp corners of a square or rectangular glass table. As the family dining table is likely to take a bit of a beating something not too expensive, or that looks good when slightly worn is perfect, with solid wood being a popular choice.
The family dining table is often the dining table that we prefer to spend less money on, & there is a good choice of inexpensive solid pine tables on the market, however these can unfortunately be somewhat boring as they all look pretty much the same & often have an unattractive yellowish varnished finish that shows the knotty texture of the pine instead of playing it down. Pine is a perfectly decent wood, but is rather ubiquitous & doesn’t always have a nice grain, so whilst it ticks the practical & inexpensive boxes you may want something a little better looking, especially if this is also the dining table you use for entertaining.
It is possible to customise a plain pine dining table to make it a little different, & even quite lovely, as long as it is a solid wood not a veneer. You could even customise & use just the top & put a different base on to make something even more personal.
The first thing you will need to do is sand the table down to the bare wood to remove the varnish. This should be easy enough to do with a hand held machine sander, but it might be best to do this part outside otherwise you could be cleaning up dust from your cupboards for months to come. Ensure you use a mask too, as mass produced tables have finishes that could well be very harmful if the dust from them is inhaled. Then a quick wipe with a wet cloth, wait for it to dry & your’e ready.
The easiest thing to do is to stain it. A dark oak stain will look stunning in a white kitchen & will really hide the grain, or you could choose a mid brown that still minimises the look of the knotty grain, but looks a little softer. Once it is stained & dry wax it rather than varnish it for a longer life, & a nicer finish. The advantage of waxing is that it can be easily repaired if damaged by hot mugs or spills, & you won’t need to re wax the whole table, just the damaged part.
Or you could have a look online at how to do some of the different paint effects & ‘wash’ your dining table with an oil based pale paint that is only lightly painted on & then sanded off, giving your table a ‘French antique’ distressed look. Use an off white, pale blue, green or blue/green, yellow or pale beige for a fresh feel & avoid darker coloured paints. Once you have achieved your desired finish then wax the dining table for protection.
If you want something a little more unusual why not keep the top & hunt around for something different for the base? As long as your chosen base is between 72-75cm high it will be perfect, although you will need to work out how to fix it to the top. If the base needs to be drilled & you don’t want to see the bolts when finished you could fix a smaller wooden top to the base first, which is then attached with strong glue to your wooden table top.
Have a look around salvage yards for something suitable, for example, old sewing machine bases are solid & very hard wearing & as they have tops there should be fixings you can re use or you could just glue the flat wooden top to the underside of your top as long as it is smooth.
Blocks of stone or concrete, or even bricks can also be used as a base, as can glass bricks which can look really good. Another interesting idea for a base is two old chests of drawers, one at each end, or if you want to make a pedestal table you could have two back to back. You could even use the drawers to store some of your non everyday cutlery, crockery, napkins etc although they won’t be that easy to get to so best not to store day to day items.
With just a little imagination & creativity you can have a table that is hard wearing, practical & also a real talking point & there’s no reason to have the same table as everyone else, or one that looks cheap.