Hi!  So I’ve been busy working on my office in spurts.  So much spray painting!  So much!  Can’t wait to have our garage ‘back.’

I have had a side table I ordered from Wayfair months and months ago, that looked originally like this:

Well, here is picture that Wayfair had up on their site:

 

Well… it doesn’t quit look that way (i.e. doesn’t look this way at all)!  The glass top has this blue tint, & it looks horrible.

But I still loved the table – I think the shape is gorgeous.  I knew that something had to be done about the top and bottom glass pieces.  My original idea was – use gold leaf gilding and gild the top to ‘match’ the gold of the base.  That was a great idea – except that in the meantime, I had decided to shift from a White and Gold theme in my office to a White and Copper theme.  So I translated this theme into the copper – spray painted the base copper, and copper leaf gilded the top:

 

You can see, I think, the beautiful difference in the copper and the native gold below – the top is already sprayed copper.  The copper is just cooler to me, and looks almost like a burnished, old gold:

 

Next I used copper leaf to gild the top (I was so excited about this, but it didn’t turn out as I had envisioned).  The copper leaf is to the left, and it turned out way too brassy / orange for my taste.  I listed above Gilded Planet as a great place for gilding supplies, however, I ordered this copper leaf on Amazon (Mona Lisa brand), so it may have made a difference in a more pleasing color if I had ordered it from Gilded Planet, as I have previously.  Beware – just as with gold, copper spray paint and gilding has many different hues, and I loved the gold / burnished / cool gold look of the spray paint, but not of this orangie gilding, so I just spray painted with the same spray paint I used on the base right over the gilding (you can see the spray paint overlay to the right, not orangie at all):

 

I used Krylon metallic spray paint with the shiny, big metallic head, as shown here:

 

And finally, here is the finished product – I love it:

 

I hated the really rough metal texture of this piece to begin with, plus I needed to seal the paint so that it would look great for years to come, so I put on two coats (over the entire surface, base and top and bottom) of Safecoat Acrylacq, an amazing, eco-friendly, green polyacryllic that Young House Love turned me onto.  I bought a gigantic container (5 gallons I think), and still have about half a container left, after doing our kitchen cabinets, this, and several other projects.  I love this stuff, and now it has a shiny, smooth texture.  I’m a big texture person, and now it is smooth as silk!

Sources:

• Wayfair end table
• Krylon copper spray paint (too expensive on Amazon, but a better picture of exactly what I used) – I picked mine up at Michael’s
• Safecoat Acrylacq Gloss Finish, eco friendly clear poly