The entryway table

I'm linking up with Miss Mustard Seed for her Furniture Feature Friday Party!

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I've always wanted a proper entry.  In Southern California there aren't a lot of houses that have such things.  So you can imagine my glee when we moved into this house in Washington and it has one!  

One problem.  What the heck goes in it??  

It sat empty for a long time...until this past August to be exact.

  

I finally got tired of looking at the random stuff I put in there trying to figure it out and went on a hunt while the boys were on a camping trip.  I mean, what better time to hunt than while alone? No dinner to make, no one to entertain, no one but me!!  :)  While making the rounds of all my favorite thrifting places, I hit Spencers Antiques last. I should have gone there  first.  

I found this table in the last booth I looked at.  Perfect!!

  Just a few random things I wanted in this space.  

After shopping the house, I came up with about 95% of what is in it now.  It was quite a relief since I didn't want to be out shopping anymore.  I wanted to be fiddling around!

One day I got sick of all the brown and remembered an 'oops' paint I had and decided to paint.  I sanded the top and realized under the ugly brown was some nice wood.  I didn't have any stain on hand, but I did have scratch cover.  So that's what I used along with a poly coat. It turned out pretty OK if you ask me.  

During a recent trip to Seattle I found this rug at Ikea. Side note: you have no idea how much I dislike being 4 hours from Ikea.  I used to be 10 minutes from one.  

The chair is also from Ikea and the pad is from Homegoods years ago.  The gum dispenser belonged to my grandparents.

(I'm fairly embarrassed to say that the gum in there is about 3 years old.  Yuck.  Thankfully, nobody wants any!)

The long basket here is also from Spencers and has 5 wire dividers inside, so I used it to put canning jars in each one to hold flowers in the beginning.  When they died, I used it just to fill space, but I love it! To keep some small things organized I found three wire baskets (I couldn't decide on a color, so we each got our own color) to throw hats and floppy purses and such in at the end of the day.

It looks really blue in this ↓ picture, but a truer shade is what you see in the shot above.  It's a flat paint and at first I wasn't sure about it, but in the end I liked it a lot. I distressed it here and there and love these little nail holes.

One of my favorite things about it are these little curvy bits.  Second to them is the top which is two wide slats of wood with a few marks here and there and a bit of a gap between them.  It has a great lived in feel that I love.

I finally feel like this area is finished thanks to this find.  Of course there's always something to rearrange or redo altogether. I love to keep the front door open now and I'm not embarrassed when someone comes a callin'!  :)

(I apologize that my pictures are more on the yellow side than I would like.  It was nighttime when I took most of them, but they do get the point across!)