A lot of furniture in our house is things we bought from Ikea or gained from friends, which means everything is pretty much black, brown, or some combination of the two. To brighten up a sunny living room, we decided to start by seeing what we could do to improve the coffee table!
The table is an older Ikea Hemnes coffee table [link for below sample images copyright, not sponsored], which has a solid pine top and a floating lower shelf. Ours is black/brown coloured and sits in the middle of the living room, making the room feel quite dark. We decided to upcycle the table and settled on painting the frame and lower shelf white, with a darker stained wood coloured top. This combination will then match some planned future projects I will be making for the house (see some of my upcoming projects to be shared here). Amusingly, Ikea now actually do the table in a very similar colour combination (“white stain/light brown“), but doing it ourselves saves us spending over £100 to buy a new one!
The first step was to dismantle the table – the lower shelf fits inside the frame so was easy to remove. The top was secured using twelve roundhead screws, with four on each long side and two on each short side, sunk into the frame.
Once the table was in pieces, I set up the saw horses in the garden and tackled the top using my belt sander and a 40 grit sanding belt. This worked very quickly to remove the black finish, but made a lot of dust!
Once I had finished removing all the black finish, I switched to my random orbit sander and went up through the grits to 120 grit to obtain a nice smooth finish. As we wanted to paint the frame and lower shelf white, we decided to simply paint over the existing black finish without removing it. We applied several coats of a primer, leaving it to dry for a few hours in between.
While the primer was drying, I applied an oak wood stain to the top of the table to try to darken down the very pale pine colour. As the pine is slightly yellowy, this made the surface somewhat reddish. Not quite what we were going for, but still looks nicer than the black.
I applied several coats of the stain, giving the surface a light sanding in between. While the wood stain dried, we painted several coats of white paint onto the frame and lower shelf.
Once everything was dry, we move the pieces back into the house and reassembled the table – I screwed the table top back onto the frame and we slid the lower shelf back into place.
The improved table definitely lightens up the living room, as well as matching with the white sofa (also Ikea!), so I think this was a definite success. We still have several book cupboards and other dark/black furniture items around the house, so I imagine there will be more upcycling to come! 🔨
The Woodworking Scientist 