After Marie Kondo-ing my basement in the spring, I unearthed this vintage typewriter table. I purged all the junk that was sitting on top of it, but I couldn’t bring myself to part with the table itself.
I’m all about vintage industrial style these days, and I’m a sucker for anything on wheels. The drab grey legs did not spark joy though, so I put updating the cart on my “to do” list.
Last weekend I finally got around to doing it.
I wanted to paint the legs in a flat black paint, but I didn’t have any on hand, so I mixed up a small batch of homemade chalk paint, combining a little plaster of Paris with water and then adding some black exterior semigloss that I had.
I painted the legs with my paint concoction. It took three coats to cover.
When the legs were dry, I taped off some grain sack-style stripes on the plywood top.
I wanted three stripes on each side of the tabletop: a wide one in the middle flanked by narrower ones on each side. The stripes took three coats of paint, as well.
Here’s what the table looked like when it was all done. For a simple makeover, I thought it was a huge improvement.
The table is probably going to end up in my office, holding my computer printer, but for blog picture purposes, I decided to style it with some vintage office supplies that I had nearby.
After I had taken a few pictures with the antique desk lamp, it occurred to me that I actually own an old typewriter, so I dug that out of storage and snapped a few more photos.
The truth is, I bought the typewriter at a garage sale probably 10 years ago with the intention of pulling the keys off and making jewelry pieces out of them as was the craze back then, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to actually tear the typewriter apart.
Maybe someday. Or maybe I’ll just have to take up typing again, now that I have the vintage typewriter table to set the machine on.
