How I Rescued An Abused End Table

Upcycle is more than the art of making do. Upcycle has nothing to do with saving money, although you may very well back into saving some money by accident. Upcycle is the art of taking an absolutely dreadful and disastrous item off the trash heap and turning it into a work of art that makes you smile every time you see it.

The story of this multi-level end table began in sadness and misery - the story of angry lives not going much of anywhere. I like to think it ends in smiles. Or, at least, it makes me smile. 

Perhaps it will do the same for you. My goal is to inspire you.

How it started

Some years ago, I woke to the sight of neighbors across the street angrily dragging out their furniture to break off the legs. Well. There is only one reason for that, and we all know it. They were being evicted, and they had nowhere to go that furniture would fit, and so they wanted to be sure they weren't leaving anything the landlord could resell for profit.

"Hey," said the lady, who then told me what I'd already figured out. "You're crafty. Why don't you take some of this stuff? I hate to think of it all going to waste."

It was not, I could see, her idea to leave a path of destruction in her wake.

"All right," I said. "I've still got room in the garage for a couple of small items. Thanks."

Shortly thereafter, the angry men of the family whisked her away never to be seen again, and I was left regarding the items I'd taken. Quite frankly, I was tempted to sneak them back onto the trash heap.

The cheap you-know-what of a landlord would have to hire someone to haul away the mess anyway. A couple more small tables more or less wouldn't be noticed. I mean, really. Although made of solid wood, this multi-level table was in distressing shape. 

Somebody had played tic-tac-toe on its surfaces. With carving knives!

For pity's sake.

Who does that? 

And yet my brain was already cooking with ideas. The bones of the piece were still there. I could spackle and sand to create a new surface. That part wasn't even hard. I already had the black and scarlet paint from other small projects.

An idea blossoms

Wait a minute.

Yes! I could do this. After all, the basic work of the project - the work anyone might do who has a cordless sander - was to spackle, sand, and paint it black.

Easy peasy. Let it dry. A lot of people might have stopped there.

But the seed of the inspiration kept growing.

The next step was to paint the top surface in a color then sold at Kmart as Chinese red. Again, let it dry.

Next, I thinned the black paint with water and used crumpled-up balls of fabric cut from a worn-out tee-shirt to create the marbled texture of the top layer.

Here is another natural stopping point. I could have done that on all the layers, and I think it would have looked fine.

But I'm glad I continued. It was the final step - the decoupage step - that makes me smile every time I look at that corner of the room.

You see, the two lower tabletops are covered in paper ephemera from my travels. The middle shelf is simply composed of old maps torn and dipped in decoupage glue to create the shiny surface.

The bottom shelf also has a layer of old, torn maps. But, on top of that layer, I also layered in a collage made from all sorts of old tickets from my travels, some also torn, some not:

• A domestic first-class boarding pass
• An international business-class boarding pass
• A Macau Turbojet and Hong Kong Star Ferry ticket
• Metro or Underground tickets from Paris, Munich, London
• Bus and train tickets from Amsterdam
• Whale-watching tickets from Maine and New Jersey
• An elevator ticket to the top of some tower in Munich

Basically, I had a shoe box of old paper tickets from times and places in the twenty-first century still using paper when I happened to be there - and the blue-toned items in the shoe box ended up in the collage.

A project begun in sadness ended in delight. Trash became a treasure that brought back memories in the making. And it still brings back memories today, because the table is still in use.

If my story inspired you, I'd be thrilled if you gently tapped that <3 button and/or left a small tip.