Tea Table

I always enjoy reading The Guardian’s Craft pages although, as with so many projects and patterns, I rarely get around to making any of them. Until now.

Behold, my newly re-vamped table, thanks to this lovely article by Will Taylor. You may already be familiar with his fabulous interior design blog Bright Bazaar but, if not, I urge you to take a look.

Will’s original project used a new but plain dining table from Ikea. I had a rather different starting point – a very battered, slightly wonky and rather old-fashioned looking table.

Mmm, don’t you just love that dark shiny varnish. I’d been toying with painting it for a while, but Will’s version presented a bit more of an exciting prospect.

So, first off, paint. I used the same paint that is on all the interior doors of my flat, partly to help the colours blend in a small space but mainly because I already had the paint so it would save some cash. It’s a satin finish wood paint from Dulux in a pretty duck-egg blue.

Now for the fun part. As Will points out, it’s easy to order or pick up wallpaper samples from all sorts of places. I went for a couple of posh purveyors of fine wallcoverings, on the basis that they would probably have some of the most interesting designs and colours, printed on good quality, thick paper. Both Little Green and Farrow & Ball allow you to order 5 or 6 A4 samples online for free.

The hardest part was finding the right colours. I didn’t want anything too pale and liked the idea of some stronger patterns as it was a small surface area. My living room is mostly blue, beige and brown, and I quite fancied some darker earth tones to balance out the blue of the table, but most of the ones they had were either too light or clashed with the duck-egg shade. So I ended up using more blue tones that I anticipated. But overall I’m really pleased with the ones I chose.

As you can see, the table top has a crack all the way down on one side, and papering over it wasn’t an option as the wood ‘gives’ when you put anything heavy in the middle, so I divided the area into three columns. The two on the outer edge are the same width, with the central one slightly wider.

Once I’d glued them all down with some PVA, I covered the whole thing in a couple of coats of matte decorators’ varnish. My application of this wasn’t brilliant as it made some of the paper bubble slightly. And I might need to re-apply a bit of glue in a couple of corners. But with such a rickety old table I was free to experiment without worrying about ruining it. Now that I’ve done it once I’d love to try the technique again.

But for now, I’m happy with the table, adding a little character and colour to my teatime.