The Epic Story of The Table

Last fall when we were getting ready to move Rush into his new bedroom, we bought a little kid table and chairs from Ikea that I thought was wood with a light stain, but in fact was raw wood. That was not great news for me, as I had recently discovered that contrary to my own ideas about myself, I’m actually terrible at painting. For some reason I decided I could paint it anyway, probably because I consider it too humid to work with stains. And I’m delusional.

So I started painting the table and it was indeed a disaster. One of many problems was not having a clear plan, so I ended up with a brown chair, a purple chair, a yellow chair…it was seriously ugly and at some point I had the sense to put down the paintbrush and ban myself from ever trying to paint furniture anything more complicated than a single color. I mentioned the episode to my sister Casey, who loves to paint furniture, and she immediately said she wanted to paint it and would pick it up next time she visited.

Next time she visited, she told me she was pregnant. My first thought was “New life, how wonderful!” My second thought was that I would never see that table painted. I didn’t want to be a downer and let her know that she would likely be too tired and nauseous to even get out of bed, so I let her take it. She brought it back, not painted, the next time I saw her.

The table and chairs sat in our garage, quickly becoming an expensive waste of money, until my mom, painter extraordinaire, came to the rescue and took it home with her. A month later she brought back a masterpiece more fabulous than I could have imagined:

It’s so amazing that I can’t believe I’m supposed to let children eat on it or use crayons around it. I can’t imagine how long it took to finish, but it really looks awesome. I could never, ever, in a million years have done anything like it.

So Mom, thank you, thank you, thank you. I asked her if she would start selling any painted furniture, which she did occasionally when we were growing up, and it sounded like her rates had really increased. I think she said anything this labor intensive would typically run about $5,000. It’s a good thing I have connections.