denise...on a whim: Vintage Suitcase Table

I've always wanted to try my hand at one of the awesome suitcase tables I've seen around. And when I saw an incredibly gorgeous vignette on Pinterest with some brown, white and red suitcases, I fell in love! So I pulled one of my old suitcases out of the garage and got to work!

I originally shared this project over at Art is Beauty, but wanted to share with my readers, too. In case you missed it before.

If you've read my blog before, you'll know that I have a bad habit of not getting any before pictures. This project is no exception. I guess I just get so excited to get to the after that I forget about the before! Well, I'm sure you have all seen the old plain-jane, ho-hum blue suitcases, out there.

It pretty much looked like this (minus the flower)...

I started the project by cleaning the outside of the case and ripping out all of the lining in the interior of the suitcase. The ripping out is easy. The hardest part is getting all of the cardboard and glue out of there! I used some water and a paint scraper, taking care not to to damage the wood that lies underneath all of the glue. It took some elbow grease, but I got it all and then I lightly sanded it down.

I painted the interior with CeCe Caldwell Virginia Chestnut.
The dark area you see in the picture below is where a little glue was left on the surface. But I wasn't overly worried, because it wasn't gummy or anything and the inside will just be for storage.

I used Virgina Chestnut on the outside of the suitcase as well. Once dry, I taped off the stripes and used Vintage White for the wider stripes.

I then taped off an area for thin stripes over the white stripes and painted those with Traverse City Cherry.
I wanted to mimic the cool suitcases I had seen in that vignette and the end result was great!
I love how some of the Vintage White came off when I pulled off the masking tape after painting the red stripe. Instant distressing! :)

I painted the striping all the way around the case.

After painting some legs I had sitting in my garage, and waxing all of the pieces, I handed them off to Eric to construct a fabulous table!

He had originally planned on putting a board on the entire bottom of the case so as to support the legs better and make the table more sturdy. But I had already painted those pretty stripes all the way around and I didn't want them covered up! (I'm such a pain, but he loves me!)

After some discussion, I got my way (of course! lol) and he decided to put 2 runners along the sides to attach the legs to, although he wasn't quite sure if that would be enough.

Well, it wasn't sturdy enough in his book. He told me he was going to have to adjust the design and the first thing I asked him was, "is it going to cover up the stripes?" He assured me it wasn't so I let him proceed. :)

He added dowels toward the bottoms of the legs to sturdy everything up and, when I saw it, I was thrilled! I love the addition of the dowels and I'm pretty sure that the next table we make like this is going to have a shelf down there! I'm thinking that would be pretty cute.

I'm really excited about the way the suitcase table turned out. I hope you all have enjoyed it too! You can follow me on pinterest, facebook or bloglovin if you'd like. {I'd sure love it!} For now, thanks for joining me here and have a great day!