Not EVERY project goes according to plan

Hi again!  It’s Erica from For the Love of Decorating here today.  No, I’m here to show you another thrifty decor idea but you can read my last one (here).  Today’s post is about being real!

I first posted about this table on my blog waaaay back on November 21st of 2013.  It was a thrift store score at just $15.  My intention was to finish it in the fall before the weather started getting too cold for spray painting.

My Vision : I saw a crisp and clean white “lacquer” type finish on it.  In case you weren’t aware, lacquer is trending right now 🙂

And maybe that is where I initially went wrong with this project…I had an EXACT vision.  Most times, I just have an idea of what I want so I’m never overwhelmed or discouraged when things don’t go as planned.

Spray paint was the only way to go since I wanted to get a slick and smooth paint job. I prepped it and began to spray paint a glossy white.  All was going well until…the wind gently blew…and tiny black flecks began to appear ALL OVER THE PLACE!  I couldn’t get them off since the paint was damp and my attempts at doing so left fingerprints.  UGG!

I waited till it dried then tried to sand the fingerprints out but that started to pull off more paint!  So I just sprayed another coat on the fingerprint and black fleck areas.  It wasn’t perfect but I could live with a couple tiny impefections.  The paint was glossy but not exactly the “lacquer” effect I was going for.  So I grabbed a can of high gloss polyacrylic and rolled it on with a sponge roller.

DON’T EVER USE A ROLLER FOR A POLYACRYLIC COAT!

Why?  Because the coat will dry with thousands of tiny “pimples” everywhere.

OOPS!  Now I know…

This is the point where I lost my mind and wanted to chuck this thing in the trash.  But I didn’t…I just let it sit in our basement for months until I was mentally ready to deal with it again.  Months later, I sanded out the “pimples”.  Since it was now WINTER, spray paint was out of the question.  I thought “Hey, I’ll just use chalk paint, put a gloss coat on top and call it done so we can finally USE this table down here.”

I brushed it on (I’m not sure why I didn’t use a roller…probably because the brush was already down there) and the brush marks it left was just not workin for me.  It was fine, but it wasn’t my EXACT vision.

Feeling totally defeated at this point, I let it sit in the basement, AGAIN, for months.  Then spring came (well at least a couple days of warmer weather) and I decided it was time to pick myself up, brush myself off, and try again.

I took it outside for a good 30-45 minutes of sanding with an orbital, smoothed out all the brush marks, got rid of all the black flecks, and fixed that not-so-perfect fingerprint corner.

And that’s where the project sits at the moment.  On the next warm and zero-wind day, it will AGAIN get a few coats of glossy white spray paint, finished off with a few coats of lacquer spray paint that I recently discovered in the paint aisle.

So there you have it…the project that DIDN’T go according to plan.  I hope to be sharing my sob story along with an accompanying VICTORY post on my blog when I get this thing done once and for all.

If you’d like to follow along on this table’s journey, I’d love to see you pop over to my blog or connect with me on any of my social media platforms!

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Do you have any projects like this still hanging over your head?

What’s your biggest project FAIL?