Porch Coffee Table Tweaking

Happy Mother's Day!!
I had such a wonderful day! My family took such good care of me! I even got to finish a project I had started earlier in the week.
I am finally redoing my porch (more about that in a later post) and I had found a table from TJ Maxx that I thought I could tweak. It's made of reclaimed barn wood (which I loved) but it was 24" tall and I needed a coffee table. Also, it had no finish on it and I knew it would not last outside on the porch for long without something to protect it.
No problem! I can fix that! I brought it home and had my hubby cut it down to about 18".

It took some sanding with a palm sander after we cut it to get the weeble wobble out of it. Then my husband hammered the plastic doodads back into the bottom of the legs.

Here it is at its new height...

So far so good!
Then instead of staining it, I decided to water down some black paint I had on hand. It's about 1/3 paint and the rest is water.

I worked on small sections at a time painting the stain on with a brush and then wiping some off with a bunch of damp paper towels.

Thankfully, what I wanted to happen did! That barn wood was soaking up the paint like a sponge and a lot of the grain was still showing through.
After it dried in the sun for a bit I decided to try a polyurathane we had gotten from lowes awhile back but were never able to use. Notice the $1 price tag!

This is when I thought I ruined the whole thing. It was going on BLUE! Yes, I said blue! Thankfully, it dried clear and I think the blue was so you could see where you had already painted.

Once it dried, I could not have been happier with the results! Don't you love when that happens?
Here's a sneak peek of it in it's new home on my porch. Hopefully soon I will reveal the whole porch redo.