Tree Trunk Table

Over a year ago, my dad brought us this tree stump from the north woods of Wisconsin:

I wrote about it in this post from November 2011.

We finally got to turning this stump into a side table this summer over the course of several weeks.  First, I took the bark off of it.  Then we sanded and sanded and sanded.  And when I say 'we', I mean I did about 5% of the sanding and Bill did the rest.  Thanks Bill!!  We worked on it for a few minutes here and there when we were out in the garage anyway.  And even though we did tons of sanding, the stump still had some kind of weird wormy texture to the surface that was under the bark:

(The Barbie case is circa the mid 80's...totally rad, no?)

 I went back and forth over whether I should leave the trunk's sides natural or spray paint them white.  In the end, I decided that I wanted to hide the wormy texture as best I could with white spray paint on the sides, and we opted to leave the top (and bottom) natural with a clear gloss finish:

It's the perfect little addition to our basement seating area!!