Brighten Up Your Furniture with Free Coffee Table Makeover

Let’s make over this sad little coffee table that I rescued from the curb. I want to make it over into a much more modern version of itself.
Tons of furniture flipping inspiration, tips and tricks for all of you out there who are either starting your own little furniture side hustle, or maybe you just want to reimagine some of the furniture in your own space.
I normally steer clear of coffee tables because they’ve never been great for me, but something about the lines of this piece really drew me in. I love the base, and I think it’s going to make an awesome flip.
I need to start out with a good clean, like I do on all of my flips. I’m using some trisodium phosphate, which is a heavy duty degreaser and deglosser.
This is a chemical, so you want to make sure that you are wearing gloves while you’re working with it. And I’m just just using a little scrubby sponge to help me get down into all of those details, especially on the base.
As soon as I was done cleaning everything, I went back with some clean, clear water and rinsed everything off just to make sure there was no residue left behind.
After I let the table sit out in the sun for a few hours and dry out, I was ready to start sanding. I’m actually going to be chemically stripping the top of this table to refinish it, but I wanted to give the top a really quick once over with some coarse grit sandpaper just to scratch up that thick varnish layer on top and let that chemical stripper really get down in there and do its job a little bit better.

You need to use a lot more product than you could ever think is necessary, and it helps if you can keep it wet. So once I was finished applying my second layer of stripper, I grabbed some plastic wrap and just put a layer of that over the stripper to keep it moist as it did its thing and worked its magic again.
Here, you want to be really careful with this chemical stripper. It’s really harsh on skin. So I always wear chemical resistant gloves, a long sleeve shirt, long sleeve pants, and some goggles to protect my eyes from any splashes. This is a fast acting product. So about 15 minutes later, I could see that everything was bubbling up and coming away.
I grabbed a metal putty knife and started scraping away the varnish.
Also some fine steel wool to use as a scouring pad to remove everything from these edges.

Washes of chalk paint like this are honestly my favorite way to get a stained effect on wood. You can use literally any color under the sun. You can customize the opaqueness or transparency of your stain just by adding a little bit more paint or a little bit more water. You can layer colors.

You want to mix this sealer really well before each use to make sure all of the ingredients are incorporated. And then I poured a tiny bit out into a separate container and added a splash of my paint to tint it.
It is my favorite way to prevent streakiness or haziness in a polytype top coat. Using the same one and a half inch oval brush, I brushed my tinted tough coat over the entire base, just being careful to go back and check for little drips, which happen a lot on intricate details like these.