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By ISABELLE HOOLEY [email protected]
Saturday, July 02, 2005     Page: 3D

Vivian Shimley has a lot on her plate, but that doesn’t stop her from
making a nice table.
   
The Exeter Township homemaker and mother of four boys said she bought a
cheap wooden table and four chairs at a garage sale for about $15 three or
four years ago. She turned the table into a tile-topped wonder and swathed its
four chairs in elegant fabric.
    “I get bored,” Shimley, 34, said, explaining her creative urges. “My
husband comes home from work, and things are completely different.”
   
First, Shimley got rid of the bargain table’s top (too small and too round,
she said).
   
She made a square tabletop frame from two-by-four’s and cut cement board –
she uses Durock- with a circular saw to fit on top of the frame. Then she
spread a thick layer of mortar on the cement board. Next, Shimley placed
12-by-12 flooring tiles, and strips of 2 3/4-by-2 3/4 tiles she’d bought at
one of the larger home stores for $2.50 apiece and $8-12 apiece, respectively,
into the mortar.
   
She laid the smaller tiles outside the larger ones as a border. Then she
spread grout over the top.
   
“In a perfect world I’d say don’t walk on it for 48 hours, but with a table
it’s easier. Nobody’s walking on it. It sets up in less than an hour.”
   
Shimley’s husband, a carpenter, bought a big piece of oak for $40 and cut
it into decorative strips, she said. He nailed the strips into the table’s
edges with brad nails.
   
Shimley wanted the rest of the table to match its stony-looking tile top,
so she sprayed the table’s base with Plasti-kote Fleckstone Spray Paint. The
paint, sold at craft stores such as Michael’s for about $3 a can, gives a
speckled, stonelike finish to a surface.
   
The upholstery on the chairs of Shimley’s bargain find was ultra-aquamarine
blue, a color Shimley said she found hard to tolerate. Chair transformation
came in the form of soft, silvery-gray fabric and pinkish marbled fabric
Shimley picked up at Wal-Mart for 99 cents a yard. She reupholstered the
bottoms of the chair with the pinkish marbled cloth – it would disguise errant
pieces of food and stains, she said. She unscrewed the chair bottoms and
wrapped the fabric over them, stapling it into place.
   
It was harder to work with the backs of the chairs, she said. Taking off
the blue cushions to wrap the silvery-gray fabric around them required taking
off the chair’s arms and the back frame. Shimley ended up draping the fabric
over the backs of the chairs in neat folds. She tied it with leftover scraps
of material.
   
Cost of the table? About $80, Shimley said.
   
Time investment? Three hours, though those lacking Shimley’s crafty
expertise may want to slow it down.