I bought a few wood end tables at a garage sale a couple of years ago.  The kids use them for coloring, eating, playing, kicking, etc…  They’ve been well loved.  I think I only paid $5 for both of them and they were already a little worn so I never really worried about them.

We’ve been restructuring our downstairs area and those tables were getting a lot more use and were getting harder and harder to clean off.  I decided to come up with a solution.  I’ve been thinking about it for some time and the other day at Joann’s I saw a remnant of vinyl.  This isn’t the sticky vinyl I’ve been using in my Cricut.  This is car upholstery vinyl.

I cut a strip big enough to fit the top and started to cover the top of the table with Mod Podge.

The Mod Podge probably wasn’t the best choice of glue.  But, it is what I had handy.  For the second table I used yellow carpenter’s glue and it seemed to have a better hold.  In the end, neither one of them held it on perfectly but I came up with a good solution.

Why didn’t you just staple it on, ChristyNelson.net? Good question.  That was what I was planning originally.  Then, I decided that it was too loud to do at night and I didn’t really want the vinyl to wrap all the way around the edges of the tabletop.

This is Duck Tape brand duct tape and you can find it in all sorts of designs.  This one I found at my local Super Target.  I thought this would be just the thing to put around the edge of my end tables.  It will cover up the rough edges of my vinyl (I just trimmed it with scissors–that was the easiest way I found) and it would also hold down the edges where it was kind of easy to peel up the vinyl.

I placed the tape along the edge and did one side at a time.  I folded over the corners with the first bit of tape to reach it and then started the next side by overlapping it.

I call the covering my “permanent placemat” and will be easily cleaned with just a wet cloth.  One down…one more to go!