Marble & Gold Table (for only $60!)

I absolutely love a fun and relatively easy DIY project like this. Ok well honestly I won't call it super easy, but it's totally one of the easiest Pinterest type "Ikea hack" tutorials you'll ever read. I mean seriously I originally got this idea a year ago when I saw a similar table on Pinterest and this girl was telling me to learn a "marbling" painting technique that looked hella intricate. She had all kinds of paints to make levels of marble and days in between coats and I was just like oh no this is NOT for me, I couldn't even make it to the end of the video let alone do it myself. But then I found this paper on Amazon that actually looks really good and I was like ok this is a project for me now that it is MUCH simpler. All you need is this table from Ikea (link below), white paint or primer, gold paint (or any other color you want really) and this marble contact paper! I actually made this table for about $20 because my boyfriend bought this Ikea table about 4 years ago and now it's been in our shared apartment for the last two years.

I don't know about you but I have a lot of days where I'm just like OK I'm so bored with my furniture I need to switch something up. I was getting super tired of this boring black table that honestly didn't even look good in my apartment, so I decided to spruce it up and give it an ice cream paint job as the kids say (unless that's a sexual term in which case I don't condone it). Below are the links to the table, the paints I found to work best, and the contact paper I used.

For the gold paint I had to use 2 jars of the 2 oz size, so 4 oz all together, which came out to about $13 dollars. Actually I decided to be cheap and buy one jar and then ran out of paint halfway through my second coat and frantically called my boyfriend to go to various hardware stores around New York to try to find me another jar of it on his way home from work. BUT if you do it the right way learn from my mistakes then you can just buy the two jars on Amazon (lol). The marble contact paper was only $7 and I even had a lot left over (I put it on the top of my MacBook and I gotta say I feel pretty fancy with a marble freakin laptop to match my marble table)

Ikea Nesting Tables

Marble Contact Paper

Gold Furniture Paint

Instructions:

1. First wipe down the table really well with a damp rag to make sure there isn't any stuff that will get in the way of having a clean surface to paint

2. Now that your surface is clean, take the glass off the table and put it in a safe place where it won't get paint on it, or get broken. I put it on my couch, not so smart because I almost sat on it multiple times while I was waiting for paint to dry.

3. Use a drop cloth or newspaper or whatever really to cover the ground underneath the table, then cut a piece to cover the bottom table surface to make sure it doesn't get any paint on it and tape the edges down with painters tape. I used a razor blade with a handle (the pretty pink one in the picture) to cut the edges of the tape to make sure the lines were as precise as possible.

4. Using a paint brush (I found a brush works better than a sponge or roller, yes I tried all three) paint the entire frame with your primer or white paint so that the gold paint really pops. If you don't do this you'll regret it later because you'll have to put way more gold paint to make it look really gold.

5. Now paint the entire frame with your gold paint. Seriously try to take your time doing this and use a small brush that you can use to do thin and even coats. This is a picture of mine after its first coat of gold paint. It's definitely pretty spotty with one coat, you probably need 2-3 coats total. Just make sure to use those light brush strokes and wait a half hour to an hour in-between coats to avoid any globs of paint, the smoother it is the better it will look. As the guy at the hardware store told me "don't mess it up and leave brush strokes or it's gonna look real tacky"

Also Featuring my kitten Ollie who still has a gold whisker from trying to eat the paint. Pro tip, keep cats distracted by putting on youtube videos of birds on a screen in another room.

6. When the paint completely dries (a few hours probably, but I waited until the next day, mostly because I was really tired of painting by nightfall) measure out your marble contact paper REALLY carefully to fit the bottom of the table exactly. Peel just a tiny bit of the sticky side back and stick it to two corners of the table. Carefulllllllly peel back the rest of it and smooth out any bubbles as you go with a credit card to make sure it goes on flat!

TA DA! Issa marble table, and you are officially classy now. So go invite some friends over and impress them with your new fancy furniture, which one of them will probably spill on.