For the past 3 weeks...

Last August I found a wonderful solid oak dinner table at Goodwill. I was thrilled because it's so hard to find solid wood furniture anymore! Even though the stain and finish was old and needed much repair... I really liked the design of the table. It was made really well and I knew if we could re stain it someday... it would be a great piece of furniture. So that became our dinner table for the past year.

Finally Josh had an opportunity to work on it. I have a friend from church who's husband, Bob, graciously offered Josh his wood working shop to work on the table. So for the past few weeks Josh has been stripping, sanding, staining, and finishing this old table. Bob is a great carpenter and has taken Josh under his wing to show him the tricks of the trade. Bob is a retired hand surgeon, so he is a very detail oriented craftsman and Josh has learned a lot from him.

I know it's hard to see (and it's not the greatest of me), but this is the only picture I have with our table in it. It's the round table on the right side of the picture. You can see how dark and worn it is. I think if you click on the picture, it'll show you a large size of the photo.

Who knew the grain would be so pretty?! I wish you all could have seen the old finish on this table. It was so dark and thick that you could barely see the grain. Once Josh scrapped all that junk off, we started to see how pretty the wood was.

We originally wanted the table stained really dark to match the rest of the house, but after 2 coats of stain, the grain really popped out and we loved it.

In the photos the table looks brown, but the stain we used has a lot of black in it. Hopefully it'll go well in the house. We should be getting the table back in the house by Tuesday.