Coffee Table at Six Hours
The finish is starting to grow on me. It seems that the Rustoleum enamel (oil based) has an absolutely amazing ability to level out.
The dust that I complained about previously appears to be specks of the silver paint that had been previously on there… I’m not quite sure how it go there, but it looks somewhat interesting and nice, sort of like a fine glitter mixed with the paint.
If it were not for the glitter I’d say it’s probably as mirror smooth as I could ever hope to get.
Here is a very bad photo (as always - the camera could not focus due to the gloss, haha) of what I’m talking about:
If you look closely at the vertical surfaces you can see the HORRID appearance that I’m hoping will clear up with the second coat of paint. I’m definitely not looking forward to ’scuffing’ the whole thing, but I also need to make up for really stupid mistakes I knew to avoid anyway.
I forgot to tack down the top of the table after I flipped it back over, thus it collected glittery dust that must have fallen from the bottom, which then resulted in the glittery appearance on the top. That was plain stupid, I knew to tack down any surface immediately before painting. That’s my theory on the glittery dust at least.
The second stupid mistake was that when I’d sanded down to bare MDF instead of just scuffing the surface down, I failed to reseal/prime the surface prior to painting. Again, I know better. I know that MDF acts like a sponge, that all surfaces need to be sealed first, I just didn’t do it… thinking that the enamel (and it’s thick like molassas) wouldn’t require it.
If I recall, I had the same problem with the edges the first time I painted with the Rustoleum ‘aluminum’ enamel. The second coat took care of it, but then that surface was primed first - albeit with super cheap wall primer.
I said earlier that I feel this piece has potential, and I still do, it’s just severely far aware from what I’m hoping to finally achieve. It’s a bit difficult for me to look past my personal involvement, in that I fucked up multiple times with this re-painting job… but already it looks like a more expensive piece of furniture… the silver & blue paint really looked cheap.
It appears my application method of using the 4″ foam brush seemed to have worked thanks to the superior leveling qualities of this paint in comparision to the horrid leveling quality of acrylic enamels I’ve used. I readied smooth paint rollers for the recoat that will take place sometime tomorrow, but I don’t think I’ll be needing those now.
If the edges still look like shit after the second coat of enamel I will have no choice but to strip it all off again (from the edges only), put on a good quality sealing primer, and then repainting… how horrid. I’m going to be very cynical here, but I’m very much expecting that I’ll need to totally redo the edges. I wish I could blame that level of mistake on breathing in all the paint fumes, unfortunately I cannot attribute that goof to solvent damaging by brain.
To recap: I built this coffee table, along with a coordinating side table and tv stand back in September/October of 2003 out of 3/4″ MDF, tons of screws, and gobs of yellow glue. ;) The MDF cost a total of $40, I cheated Home Depot out of the cutting fees (had them cut everything to size for me)… other costs were for paint, basically, so another $20. It was still a very wise investment, considering even Ikea furniture would cost upwards of 5X more than I spent. If you want to read more about that whole adventure the dizzying array of posts is right there in the archives. ;)