Personally Created: It Just Looks Like I Live Deep In The South

How inviting is this?! Relaxing on a shady porch in a rocker with a glass of iced tea and a good book (on an iWhatever).

Our favorite part of our house is the front porch. Even when the floor needs to be painted. It's just six feet deep, but it runs about 26 feet across the front of the house and another 30 feet down the south side. It's very welcoming and the shade from the roof helps keep the downstairs cool if there is any kind of breeze at all. The porch is the one thing that we both insisted on when we were adding to and renovating the original house, and it is the house's most outstanding feature.

But I'm not here to write about my porch today. I'm here to write about that little table in the photo. I know that's not my normal kind of thing, but it was so much fun to re-do! It is literally a marble top table! I found it at a neighbor's garage sale and bought it for one dollar. Yep. One. Of course it looked more like this at that time....

I think it was meant to be a plant stand. I'm not a big fan of that shade of green paint, so of course I had to cover that. I had just enough blue left from when I painted the rocker a couple years ago. I didn't want it to look new. That would make it stick out like a sore thumb at my house! So I left a few spots bare and sanded a little to let just a hint of the green come through. I have some big pieces of glass in my backyard (my uncle was the original American Picker) and a few months ago I learned how to use a glass cutter. I knew I wanted to put glass in the top and bottom of this, but I couldn't decide what to do to make it cute.

Then I remembered all those flat marbles that I used to put in vases and candle dishes. I had enough different colored ones to make a design in the top, and the bottom is just rows of green. (No problem with green glass or glasswares--I absolutely love Jadite--it's just that shade of paint. It's a home town rivalry thing.)

I just put down a dab of hot glue and pressed a marble into place. The worst part was trying to clean up all the hot glue "stringies!"

I had to squirt some glue in the joints and pound in some loose nails to tighten it up a bit, too. I'd hate to spend an hour and a half gluing down all those marbles and have the whole thing collapse under the weight!

If you wanted to do something like this, the hardest part would be finding the right piece to start with.

I took this pic from above so you could see the pattern. When the photo opened on my computer, my first thought was, "Wow! That would make a great patterned paper!" It would make a neat background for an iWhatever, too. If you use digital papers and would like a copy, just send me a message and I'll remove the watermark for you.