Restoration of an old “killed” table

An old table, loose and shriveled, and what’s more, creaky, like an ungreased cart, and your hands are itching to throw it in the fire or in a landfill. But if you work on it a little, you can get a very good furniture accessory, such as a coffee table (if you shorten the legs to a certain length), or a table for a TV. In my barn there was an ordinary kitchen table lying on a shelf, forgotten by everyone. In disassembled condition. Four bolted legs, a wooden base held together with metal brackets, and three tabletop pieces.

After examining this rarity, I initially decided to throw it in the trash car; from lying for a long time, the fragments of the tabletop made of chipboard swollen under the influence of moisture, and after drying, of course, they did not return to their original shape. Moreover, they became brittle and the sawdust, from which they were actually made, began to fall out...

The wooden base, on the contrary, had dried out to the point that it was shaking, as if alive, as soon as you picked it up! After thinking a little, I finally decided to try to “reanimate” him. One way or another, I won’t lose much if I fail.

Will need

Hacksaw.
Gas wrench or pliers.
Universal glue (you can use “Moment”).
Composite adhesive (cold welding).
Cyan acrylate glue (super glue).
Marker.
Drill and drill bits for 4 and 9.
Long ruler (or level with ruler markings).
Four thick hexagon furniture screws.
A small sheet of chipboard for a new countertop.
Decorative self-adhesive film for covering the tabletop (with a pattern of your choice).

Restoring an old table

First you need to disassemble the wooden base. Unscrew all existing screws and remove metal brackets.

Our table will be half the size of the previous one, which means those crossbars that used to be the width of the table will now become its length.

You can choose the width of the new table yourself, to suit your taste. You can even make it square! To do this, take the remaining long crossbars and shorten them to the desired width of the future table.

Just make sure that the width of the future table is at least half its length, otherwise it will be unstable! Now, on the sawn-off ends of the crossbars, we will use a hacksaw to make grooves for the metal staples, as before.

Next, we will deal with the holes left by the screws after disassembling the table. Most of these holes will again be in their original places, and to ensure that the screws holding the metal brackets hold them well, we will use matches and all-purpose glue. Dip a match into glue (or drop glue into the hole), push it all the way into the hole, and break it off.

The result was a kind of cap. Now the screw will hold well in this hole, and the table will not wobble.Well, to prevent the “new” table from creaking, drop a drop of machine oil onto the contact points of all individual table fragments, both wooden and metal. Now let's take care of the legs. If the threaded connection of these legs becomes unscrewed, it is advisable to unscrew it from the leg. Coat the thread with composite or universal glue and screw it back in.

All the way. If the connection dangles, but does not unscrew (it also happens that a threaded pin has a “T”-shaped end inside the leg), then you will have to use cyanogen acrylate (super glue). We drip it into the gap between the joint and the wood until it stops going inside. Leave the glued legs to dry. For a couple of hours so that the composite glue has time to set. (By the way, the legs can also be shortened to the height you need, planed with a plane, narrowed downward if they are square, and covered with stain.) During this time, you can assemble the wooden base; We fasten the prepared crossbars using staples and screws.

After the time allotted for the composite glue to harden, we screw the legs to the base. As before to the old table.

Now we take a prepared sheet of chipboard (I took the end wall from an old cabinet for this purpose), cut out the tabletop to the required area and sand the sawn edges with sandpaper or a wood file.

Place the tabletop on a flat surface, with the front (smoothest!) side down. Place the base on top of the tabletop, legs up, and mark the corners of the legs with a marker.

We remove the base and drill 4 mm holes in each corner, so that the holes are in the centers of the legs.Now we put the base on the legs, place the tabletop on it, and look from below so that the marks made earlier with a marker line up. Now, using the holes available in the tabletop, we drill holes further - inside the leg, to the length of the screw.

Well, with an eight-millimeter drill, we’ll make small recesses on top of the holes for the screw heads and screw in the screws.

We cover the screw head with composite glue so that the tabletop has a smooth surface. You can first lubricate the surface of the recess, and the head of the screw in it, with machine oil, then you can then easily pick out these resulting plugs in order to dismantle the table, if necessary.

We wait for the composite glue to dry and, finally, cover the tabletop with adhesive decorative film.

Paste over furniture self-adhesive wallpaper should be used as carefully as possible; there will be no second chance to re-glue it. To do this, I had to dismantle the table (fortunately, it didn’t take long to unscrew four screws and unscrew four nuts!). I humidified the air in the room using a sprayer so that dust particles would not fall on the surface to be pasted and would not form unevenness and bubbles after the work was done. I wiped the surface with alcohol, and carefully, starting from one of the corners, smoothing the film in different directions from the corner with a dry cloth, glued the film onto each part in turn. If you still cannot avoid the bubbles, pierce them with a thin needle in several places, place a regular kitchen napkin on the bubble and place a flat-bottomed mug filled with boiling water in this place. For one or two minutes. After this procedure, the bubble will disappear.And one moment; Having covered the tabletop, I changed my mind about hiding the screw heads - I really liked the look of the shiny metal heads, recessed in the “stone” texture.

But this is an individual matter for each individual. If anyone doesn’t like it that way, you can hide the hats. Also cover them with glue and stick patches cut from the same film on top... This is what the table was like (in size!):