Elf Table Rehab

So, this is not necessarily a "how-to" post, but rather a "how I did this" post.

In 2011 my boyfriend Chris gave me this AMAZING ancient coffee table for my birthday. He knows my love for weird furniture and gifted me this Elven floor table. (Is it an ACTUAL Elven table? probably not, but really, it totally is.) Its carved out of 3 pieces of solid wood. The top surface is key-holed blended into each curved spiral piece. Each spiral is 1 solid chunk of wood which is so awesome.

I love to sit on the floor, and it was perfect height for cross-legged table time. It lived in our apartment  as our main coffee table for a year. Although it is an extremely heavy and sturdy table.. wood rot, insects, and I'm sure thousands of years of elf use has worn the wood quite a bit. And by quite a bit I mean like... to a pulp.. like literally dusting off into non existence.

 There is absolutely no way that I could let this lil' gem go into disrepair, so I did my best to restore the wood damage and mend the table back into ethereal perfection.

So this is the end of the table as of 2012, I took a picture of it because I was scared it was going to get worse. (It did) At this point in time you cold poke the wood and little puffs of sawdust would come out of the holes. I think these are termite holes? Or maybe wood mosquitoes? I knew that wasn't right but I decided not to attack it until I knew how to fix it.

Here is the up close picture of it before I started the clean up. As you can see, it got a lot nastier.

So here was my plan of action, remove the damaged wood, attempt to keep as much in tact as possible, clean/sterilize the situation, fill, sand, and stain.

I set up a little work space on top of my rabbit cage (because that makes sense?) I had with me a few small chisels, wood cleaner, Windex (because you always need Windex), 100 grit- 220 girt sandpaper, lots of paper towels, wood filler,  and a putty knife.  After I had all my weapons of mass re-construction, i started to peel back small pieces of wood to get rid of all the soft pulpy parts.

... so... yeah... about a half in hour of slowly de-pulping this is what I was left with. Turns out the damage was mostly under the surface of the wood. I'm sure the polyurethane was the only thing keeping the outside of this from falling apart.

You can see from my pile that the inside wood just fell off into dust and the outside pulled off in strips. Even though I was panicked that the curve was so bad, I could tell that I still needed to get rid of more wood.

After about 15min more of ripping, I had come to a stopping point. This was it. -sigh- my poor elf-y table.

Luckily, the pulp stopped after about a 1/2 inch into the wood and once again there was hardwood. So thankfully the bug holes didn't go all the way through the spiral. So now I was left with a half inch hole filled trench across my freakin elf table.

I used 100 grit sandpaper to very carefully sand down the chippy parts of the soft wood. I wanted to leave a clean surface to have the wood fill adhere to. I got a can of canned air and blew into all the cracks to get out all the dust particles.

I did some research on what kind of wood filler to use, and I was recommended Minwax Latex Woodfill

This is a great product. It is very easy to use and mold, it is stainable, sandable, and easy to clean. It dries really fast and creates a hard surface. I bought a crap ton of it, because I didn't know what I was expecting. (I'll tell you by the end I used basically all of it.) I grabbed my putty knife and got to the fillin!

After about 2 hours of drying and adding more layers of putty, I created this monstrosity.

I left all of the woodfill dry over night, just to make sure it set into all the deep cracks. The next day I took the table outside and used 100 grit and 200 grit sandpaper to sand down the rough exterior. (I had to alternate sandpapers because I didn't want to ruin the wood stain around the puttied areas I wanted to blend it in with the good parts.)

Sanding results.

You can see in the last picture how well the wood fill hardened to fix the edge of the spiral. I was really happy with how it sanded down so perfectly. I was also happy to see that the fill got into all the drill holes and leveled out with the original wood. Yay! I also didn't hate some of the texture the fill left. The wood isn't perfect, so the textured wood fill gives the new part a bit of character.

I cleaned all the dust and sanding residue away and prepped for staining. I didn't find a wood stain that matched the original color, so I made a suicide color out of Minwax Ebony, Mahogany, and Cherry wood stain. By blending them all together and testing on a little corner, l I found a match!

LOOK! It looks so much better! See how the texture imperfections from the woodfill makes it blend in better with the old wood?

Obviously there is some differences in depth of color and sheen, but it is so much more stable and I know it will stop the damage from getting worse.

I don't know if this will be the last fix up on my Elf table, but for now I am really happy with the results. It is a perfect piece of imperfection and I hope it stays this way. :)