How do you choose what you love to do in life? I don’t think you really have a choice at all, your love chooses you. What you love to do is just a part of who you are; it’s your destiny; it’s where you feel most at home; it’s where you get this indescribable natural high and time seems to stand still. It’s when you stay up until 2am working on something, but it only feels like it’s 9pm.

DIY projects/furniture restorations/creative projects are one of my loves. I don’t know how I really got into it all; it kinda just came to be. And when the creative juices are flowing time does stand still and my life feels like it’s on cloud nine. My latest project sat in my garage for over a year before I figured out what I wanted to do with it. I can’t half ass a project; if my heart’s not in it or isn’t feeling it, it’s best for me to not even try and tackle it. You can’t force these things. In the end, the final result for this side table was the result of “Plan C” but I figured a lot out about the design as I went, due to some road blocks, and it turned out even better than what I had as “Plan A.”

Plan A’s design was to sand and stain the top a dark walnut, then paint the body and legs, and then add some hardware around the corners similar to this picture:

There wasn’t anything special about this design. It was pretty generic and not exciting. When I went to sand the top, I took a little too much off with the 60 grit paper. There was no way it was salvageable to stain. I was pretty upset and at a loss on how to proceed from that point. So it sat in my garage another couple of weeks while I mulled things over.

Plan B’s design was to paint the entire thing Annie Sloan’s Napoleonic Blue and then add some corner hardware like Plan A. I started painting the top, but left the middle part unpainted. There wasn’t a reason, it just happened.

I can’t explain why I didn’t paint the middle, but I guess fate knew that there were bigger plans…..and then Plan C came to me. I decided that I could stain the middle part (since only the border was messed up in the sanding process). I wanted to stain a design on the top. I’ve see a lot of interesting designs on Pinterest, but for this first attempt I decided to do something relatively easy with some painters tape.

I love how the top turned out! (Insert the preach it hand emojis!) The next dilemma I had was for the body. I knew I wanted the legs to be blue, but I contemplated if I should paint the side panels and the drawer white or keep EVERYTHING blue. I went with white, and it looked damn good.

My plan was to sell this table, but for now it’s sitting in my living room on the other side of my couch. I have another blue and white side table that I refinished a couple of years ago, right before I move into the house. The paint isn’t exactly the same color, but for now it works. All I need is to find some cool lamps to go on each table and it’ll be all set!