Home Repair Minimalist: Better in Black

It is well known that I have an abiding love affair for pressed-back chairs (as evidenced here, here, and here). In fact, I think altogether I have painted something like 21 pressed-back chairs, all in various shades of white! However, about two weeks ago I was seized with a sudden urge to do a set in BLACK. Lucky for me, I found the perfect dining set to fill the need!

I got a 48" round oak table with a lovely pedestal base. As you can see, the finish on the top was in poor shape.

And six of these gorgeous pressed-back chairs. They are the first of this design that I've seen!

There are two arm chairs in the set.

I wiped all the chairs down with Liquid Sander/Deglosser. It's wonderful for curvy spindles and the like. One chair required some repair work, but then I set up my "assembly line."

It was wonderful to have good weather to work outside this week!

I sanded the top of the table down to bare wood. I am never afraid of a poor finish on the top--that just makes it easier to sand down! More to be scared of are those thick, ultra-durable finishes that take hours to sand off. The base and apron were painted black.

There's not too much to be excited about when the chairs are completely painted in flat black. At this point, you might wonder what you have done...

But then you attack them all with sandpaper and a few coats of polyurethane, and look what you have instead!

Look at me! I'm so pretty!

I love that no two are exactly the same...

Without the leaf, you have a pretty round table to seat four:

Some pretty legs...

Or you can put the 24" leaf in to seat a couple more.

My kids got all excited when I brought this one in the house to take pictures (it's sitting in our front room at the moment), and asked if we were going to keep it...