Before & After: Basic Side Table Gets Some Rawr!

published Dec 10, 2013
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(Image credit: Avery Orendorf)

Avery paints murals and furniture professionally, but it was time to let her kids in on the fun. They chose this side table to jazz up and the kids both inspired the new theme (dinosaurs!) and lent a hand in the painting.

(Image credit: Avery Orendorf)

Rawr indeed! Avery gives us the scoop on how her family spent their afternoon giving this basic table some kid-friendly personality: My husband and I have been quite busy lately. (Aren’t we all?) We’ve both been working plenty of weekends and sort of miss each other and family time with our two and four year old sons. We promised some actual, for reals, family time this past weekend. My four year old wanted family time to involve painting furniture since I haven’t let him help me lately. I paint furniture and murals professionally. I thought that was an awesome idea. My dear husband was not so sure. Luckily, my sons and I are good at ignoring dear husband’s voice of reason.

Here’s the play-by-play of Saturday afternoon’s kid-friendly-ish painting project.

Step 1. Find a piece of furniture in the house that we don’t care about. Pretty easy for us since so much of our furniture is from Target or Ikea. We found a porch side table that seemed perfect.

Step 2. Design decisions. “Feral one, what should we paint on the table?” “A dinosaur eating a honey badger!” “Obviously. Why did I ask?”

Step 3. Draw and cut out a stencil out of contact paper and affix it to the table top.

Step 4: Give the boys paint pens and let them go to town. Let paint dry.

Step 5: Tape around the table legs, give boys paint pens and let them at it again.

Step 6: Add a couple of finishing touches as directed by the feral one. “Mom, can you make them talk?” “Yeah, buddy! Of course.”

And done! True awesomeness, right?

Thank you Avery! Readers, see Avery’s work on her website, Avery O Design.