MUSHROOM TABLE - A do-it-yourself project I worked on

Last autumn I found a wooden cable spool on the street. Since it looked in good shape, I thought I could find a use for it. I'm a creative person who hates wasting things. One man's trash is another man's treasure! Thus I took it and placed it in the garage. It stayed there for a few months.

One morning, I woke up thinking that it was about time to do something with that wire spool. I knew it would turn to be a table, but I was not sure what type of look it will have. The do-it-yourself ideas on Pinterest were not quite on my taste. Then inspiration hit me and I decided to convert it into a table for my son.

Here is how the final result looked like:

Now let's see the steps!

First, I wiped out the dust and removed the few nails and heavy duty staples sticking out through the surface of the wood. I chose the end that had less paint on it as the top. Then I sand it until it the surface was smooth. A few minutes later I saw that I needed to sand the whole thing. I was not too thrilled about this step.

Since the edges were still rough and small pieces were chipping off despite the sanding, I covered it with some fabric and glued it to the surface. That trick did the work!

The next step was to attach a wooden round top cover over the middle and cover the hole. Once everything was in place, I attached a white thin cotton rope around the top, to make the transition smoother. I liked the idea of different textures being put together.

This is how the table looked before I applied the paint.

Next I had to put three layers of paint before I started painting the details. Then the real fun part came: painting the table!

I had to wait two days for the paint to dry before applying a new layer.

As instructed by my son, I painted it as a mushroom. I used acrylic colours. I started with the bottom which I painted in blue and continued my way up to the top of the mushroom. It looked cute, but it felt like it was missing something.

To make it come to life, I added couple of the characters (kangouroo, mouse and frog) from the bedtime stories I had written for my son. I painted them directly on the spool, no sketch or pencil used.

Since I was painting a story, I added some of the background details as well: the mushroom house, the pond and the frog's house.

I used a plastic bottle cap as a door in order to cover one of the holes in the wire spool.

After I was done painting the details, I waited another two days before I applied the first layer of varnish. I applied two layers of clear varnish for wood.

The whole process took almost a week. You can imagine my son's excitement when the table was ready. His first reaction was priceless. He started to jump up and down, then he went to the table, hugged it and kissed it.

Now that you read about my little DIY project, tell me what are your hobbies? What do you do for fun?

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