This was one of the first projects I had done so no step by step tutorial but still great to share and to give others ideas. I saw this prison coffee table on my local for sale site for $10.00 and loved the design and thought I could give it a makeover. It is called a prison table so the lady told me but someone must have broken out because so many of the bars were broken or missing. The photo above was taken 4 years after I first gave it a makeover and one of the bars broke again, thanks to the kids.
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There were a lot of the “bars” broken and missing but I wanted to keep the look because this is what attracted me to the table in the first place. This was a quick makeover. I sanded down all the wood to remove all the old stain and varnish. I am not a big fan of the light brown furniture and I wanted to stain it using cedar stain. I went to my local hardware store and bought a length of dowel. I cut the dowel to size and glued them back into the existing holes in the table. The table top from the table lifted up, but it was in 3 pieces where it had split over time. I used wood glue to join them back together. To hold the table together while the glue dried I nailed a plank of wood to the underneath and pulled the wood together using ratchet straps.
I stained all the wood using cedar stain which was a big job trying to get into all the nooks and crannies. To seal the bars I used a clear polyurethane spray which saved so much time. The tabletop glued back together great but the top looked a bit boring. I had some ceramic tiles at home that I was going to use for another project but I thought I would try and inlay them into the top.
I used a wood router (Only my second time using one) to cut out a channel for the tiles to sit inside. But I made a big mess and the lines were skewed. My son jumped in and made the slots a bit bigger and I added an inlay. Which was a plastic stripe with a design on. I am not too sure where it came from or what it is for.
This was my picture doing a test trying to come up with ideas to fix the mess. I have come a long way in the past few years. Here is one of my latest projects. I restored an antique Dresser that should have gone to the tip but it turned out so awesome I sold it instead.
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