Steam Restaurant part 13 "the tables"

This had to be part 13 cos there were 13 tables.  Originally there were only 12 and then unlucky no13 showed up.

In the last week of June, I was going to paint the designs on the tables at the restaurant and varnish them, but it soon became apparent that there was far too much dust around as the painters were sanding and painting all over the place.  Then there was the matter of the tables being in a bad condition from being stacked and stored.

I decided to take the table tops home to scrape and sand them down then paint them before I could put my designs on.

This took up a fair amount of time as it is winter here and although we don't get snow, it does go down to about 4 degrees at night and it rains a lot... so nothing dries fast at all.

The paint had to dry and I had to do two coats which is all a bit time consuming and frustrating when all you want to do is the fun bit of putting on the designs!

Table number 13 had a bit of bad luck when I had guests for lunch one Sunday and I had just finished putting the silver design on and my friends 3 year old ran his toy car through the wet paint.  I managed to wash it all off and had to do another coat of black paint and then re-stamped the design all in one afternoon...thankfully it was a sunny day!

I used black matt enamel to paint the tables and water based silver paint on the stamps which I had used on the walls so that there was a recurrent theme throughout the restaurant.  I then had to paint a polyurethane varnish on the top to protect the design.  This of course had to dry and harden for a week before I could stack them in my car and deliver them!

That night I picked up a photo on my Whatsapp from the owner to say my tables were damaged!  I nearly collapsed with stress as they had been so hard to do and I knew that I had delivered 13 perfect tables.  I even checked the date to see if it was Friday the 13th!  It was in fact Friday 29 July, they had taken 5 weeks to do!

It turned out that only 2 were badly damaged from the staff putting them on their "face" to screw the legs back on.  When trying to fix this damage, the polyurethane went crazy cos of the moisture in the air and so I landed up sanding all the tables to match.  The owners preferred the "distressed" look and at least now if they get scratched or damaged, it will just add to the look!

I will not be doing tables for anyone in the future.  Lesson learned!  Sometimes the simplest looking thing turns out to be the hardest!