I heart Chevron

We've had this coffee table for a while. For a long time we were using it as a TV stand, but then we mounted the TV on the wall and it became a coffee table. We got it for almost nothing when we first moved in and got the majority of our furniture off of craigslist. Because it was a piece of junk, so to speak, I felt comfortable experimenting on it. Muhahaha. 

Below is a picture of the table in its plain form before I got my creepy fingers on it. 

I ruminated on what I wanted to do to this table for quite some time. Spent time on pinterest looking at DIY coffee tables and googling images of painted coffee tables etc. I knew I wanted to paint it white then put some kind of pattern on top. My initial inclination was to do chevron because I love chevron and I have experience doing chevron. As seen below in another craft of mine:

But I hemmed and hawed and even considered doing a stencil. But finally I just bit the bullet and decided chevron was the way to go. 

First step was to take the coffee table in the back and sand it down!

I sanded it down so that the paint would have something to grip to. The table previously had a coat of shinny stuff on it which would have made the paint slip right off. 

The next step was to paint it in several coats of glossy white. 

Here is the table in it plain white form while I ruminated on what design to paint it. 

You can sort of see in this photo below how I went about doing the chevron pattern. I first taped off the borders so there would be a nice trim to it. Then I made a cross weave with the painters tape. To make sure the tape was spaced properly I used a piece of wood we had laying around that was the proper size. I should have taken more pictures of this process but I always forget while in the heat of doing these things! Below is the piece of wood I used and also the right angle tool that I used initially to make sure the cross hatch was on a right angle. 

You kind of get the idea, right? Once the cross hatch was done I had to, quite paint painstakingly I might add, go back and remove the tape in between in the right places to make the chevron pattern come out right. I had to use an exacto-knife and go over the boarders of where I wanted to remove the tape, then ever so carefully remove it. 

Here is what it looked like once I was done cutting the cross section parts off:

It looks like border got funky there but really I put a few more coats of white on top when the boarder was partially on and the white paint got on the border. If you look closely you will see that it is just white paint on top of the painters tape. 

So the next step was to color in between the lines! To accomplish this I used a foam roller and rolled the paint in one direction. Again, I wish I had photo to document this, but I did not. 

I decided to use the same paint that we had painted the walls with. Which was "Smokey Taupe" by Benjamin Moore. I didn't want to use the purple that we painted the chairs with because I wanted the chevron pattern to be subtle and not hit you in the face when you walked in the room. 

I had to paint the smokey taupe over the glossy paint several times to get it to adhere well. Once I painted several coats and I was satisfied with the uniformity of the finish, and the paint was dry, I pealed the tape off. There was some slight bleed through with I went back and cleaned up with the white paint with this flat edged foam brush:

Here is what it looked like after I did some edge work and prior to me putting the clear acrylic sealer on the table:

I snatched up a clear acrylic sealer from Michaels on clearance when I was there for god knows what reason. Here it is below:

I took the table in the back outside once again and put several coats of this bad boy on. The label says to let it dry for 15 minutes in between coats but I let probably an hour pass in between coats just to make sure it was good and dry. 

Here is the table once the acrylic dried:

And here is a montage of the process:

Gotta love montages!