Alright everyone.  Gather around!  It’s story time with Lauren.  Get into a comfortable chair with your favorite drink or snack and get ready for the story of a table.

To be completely honest, I’m not exactly sure where my mom and I received this wonderful table, but unfortunately, it was just sitting on our back porch for quite a while.  It didn’t have a beautiful coat of paint or a loving home inside the house.  It just sat outside in the cold for a year or two.

So where did I start?  I started by deciding to use this table in a project.  Smart starting place, huh?  Unfortunately, I don’t have a before picture…oops.  But it was a simple brown table with nothing special, which is why I wanted to use this for my project.

I knew I wanted to paint it, so I started by sanding it.  It wasn’t too hard to take a piece of sandpaper across the table, and it became rough easily.

Painting the table black came next.  I used two cans of black spray paint to cover the table and make it look even.  Spray paint is amazing…unless you run out of it halfway through your paint job.

Now, I knew I wanted the lyrics from one of my favorite songs on the top of the table.  The song “Salvation” by the Christian rock band Skillet is almost always on repeat in my car.  This song is very inspirational, having lyrics like “Keeping me alive, you are my salvation” and “my heart will burn for you, it’s all I can do”.  I wanted to keep the beauty of the lyrics, but I didn’t want to take away from them because they were on a table.

So…I went with a cursive manuscript called Laurenis Handwrittingcus on Microsoft Word and started to put the lyrics on the table.

I had quite a few failures before I finally found something that worked.  The first thing I tried was writing all the lyrics on an overhead projector that mom got from somewhere (who knows where) and project the lyrics on the table and copy it.  Even though that worked in the way that all the lyrics fit on the projector, I couldn’t fit all of the lyrics on the table in a way that I liked it.  Plus, because of the projector is square, and the tabletop has a curve, the edges would’ve been bare.

The second thing I tried was writing in chalk and then writing over it in sharpie.  Okay…the chalk looked awesome, but the sharpie didn’t.  Not only did the sharpie not write over the chalk, but when I tried erasing the chalk with a wet washcloth and rewriting in the sharpie, the sharpie still wouldn’t write.  UGH!

So, I finally wrote with a chalk marker.  I picked white because I wanted the table to look classy.  This time, I erased the chalk and rewrote the lyrics with the chalk marker.  This worked great…until the lyrics didn’t match up on the bottom of the table.  Thank goodness spray paint is easy to use and it doesn’t get extremely messy.

And now…the finished project!

The table turned out beautiful.  I cannot wait to find a place in my apartment or bedroom or mom’s house to put it.

I think I did a pretty good job writing on the top of the table.  It was simple in the sense that it was a flat surface, but it was hard to keep it straight and have all the words be the same size.  I also like the title at the bottom of the table so I can cover the top and people who look at it can see what song it is.

This song is very inspirational and was a great motivation for this project.  It is uplifting and makes me happy.

So now this little table has a better life as a classy looking table.  It can be used as an end table or just a piece of decoration.  But for now, it has a much better life than a life sitting on the back porch.

I challenge you to listen to this song and tell me what you think.  Do you have a song that inspires you or lifts you up when you are down?  Let me know in the comments what you think!