Surprise Decoupage Table For My Teenage Son. It's a Hot Chili...But Not The One You Are Thinking.

Pic from the redo a few years back.
 Just to give you an idea of the room.

In between doing projects for the home and such, I slipped in a little something special for my teenage son.   My son is a musician and a song writer.  His room is dominated by his passions with three guitars, a mandolin and a ukulele sitting on his futon, an electric keyboard propped up in the corner and his mic for recording on a stand in the middle.  He also likes to collect vintage 70s rock albums and has them displayed on the walls in his room.  I just got rid of his loft bed and his mattress is currently laying on the floor.  Funny thing, he loves it there and doesn't want a bed! Teenagers.  What ya gonna do?

As soon as we get the garage cleared of a bunch of junk, I am having it painted. At the same time my son's room is going to get a fresh coat.  The walls are pretty banged up.  Ya gotta wonder what the heck he does in there?!  I have ordered wall hooks for his guitars and can't wait to get the guitars out of harms way.  The futon is just not a place to put this type of stuff. 

Notice one has a hole. bummer. But he says it
sounds nice anyway.

Months ago, I showed you his clothing shelf here.  It was always such a mess.  We tried everything, but in the end when the loft bed went, so did the shelf.  I re-organized his closet and his clothes are doing pretty good in a four draw Rubbermaid unit. 

So what is the special project?  Well, he had this table in his room that I brought home from a trash pick off a neighbor's pile.  I took it out in an effort to de-clutter. Plus, it just never matched and looked ridiculous sitting in the middle of his room.  Well, he really misses the darn thing. Come to find out, it was the perfect 'coffee table' that he liked placing his electric keyboard onto when he played it...which is often.  Bad mommy.  Putting style in front of function. (wink)

Knowing that he needs this table back, I decided to surprise him with a presto chango project.  His hands down favorite band of all time is the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I gotta admit, I like them a lot too.  I researched online for The Red Hot Chili Peppers and found a collection of black and white images of them taken over the band's long career. I arranged them in a collage the size of the table top. 

I painted the table satin black.

I then decoupaged a collage of the images onto the top of the table.  I first used a fixative spray on the images in an attempt to keep them from smearing and the ink bleeding. 

But in the end, the red ink still bled through when I was applying the first top coat of Modge Podge.  I decided to just 'go with it.'  Turned out to be a happy accident because it left behind a patina that gave the top a little visual interest. 

You can kinda see the pink that mixed with the
first coating of Modge Podge.  I spread that out
to create a pinkish-purple hue in places.

Here you can really see the pink accents.  It's cool.

So here it is ready to be presented.  He has no idea that I have done this.  He thinks the table is gone forever.  So excited to see if he likes it. Fingers crossed.

I have been researching cool ideas on how to get his bed a little off the ground.  I thought this one was kinda cool.  I have it on my Pinterest if you want to take a look at it there.  What do you think? 

Do you have any great ideas for creating a platform? Send them along.  Maybe I will surprise him again with a totally cool platform for his mattress.  Sometimes it's fun to do surprise projects for my kids. After all, they put up with their crazy artist mother everyday.  It might as well benefit them too. Right!?

-The End-
THIS POST WAS FEATURED!!!! YEAH!