Dining room table part 1

I've been browsing craigslist lately to look for furniture to add to our new home. I finally found a large dining room set for $90 about 10 minutes from our house. With our first home, we had a large heavy formal dining table and formal living room that nobody ever used. The chairs for our formal dining room were so big and heavy they never got moved. This time around, I wanted something useful I could use everyday. Since our new house has no formal living space, I knew I needed a bigger table. This table can sit eight comfortably. Its big, heavy, sturdy, and has great details.  

These are the stock pictures from the craigslist ad. 

Our bathroom renovation actually hit a major roadblock. We had mold and plumbing issues.  The plumber gave me quote for $1400 to repair the sub flooring, convert a shower to tub layout, re-plumb the drain out for the tub, build the frame for the tub, and redo some illegal electrical wiring in the bathroom. Long vent short, my $2K budget is down the drain. I'm guessing my total budget will come out somewhere between $3K.

Since I couldn't work on the kids bathroom right away, I decided to demo the powder room downstairs. A powder room is just another fancy name for a half bath. :) Everything in that room is gutted. I'm proud to say that I gutted more than half of that room myself. We are expecting to finish up that bathroom by mid next week.

Back to my dining room set. I first filled minor cracks with wood filler. I let it dry and lightly sanded it down. You can see int he picture below where I filled them in.

Next I primed with Zinsser cover stain primer. I painted the whole set three times in case I have bleed through. Below is the primer and how the dining set looked after one coat of primer.

This is how the table looks today with three coats of primer and two thin coats of paint. For the paint, I wanted something very durable since we will be using this table a lot. I decided on Benjamin Moore's advance paint in satin in a slightly off white color. I was told if you add just a tint of color to the pure white, it will cover better. This paint when fully cured will be very solid and won't peel/scratch easily. It will take about a whole week to fully cure.

Here's how the chairs looked without the seat cushions. I'm planning to add upholstery to the backs therefore I left the backs original.

I'll be back in a few days to finish up the dining room set. I ordered some upholstery supplies online so I'm on a standstill with the the dining set.