Fish Tank Stand Table
Several years ago, back when my kids were all living at home and we were dumb enough to do a paper route, I came upon a little fish tank stand that one of our customers was throwing out. I scooped up the stand as I was itching to try my hand at a mosaic table out of plates. My little stand was a perfect base for this project. I promptly spray-painted it black, attached a wood base to each shelf area and started hitting the thrift stores for the perfect plates to break up.
I found some pretty cabbage rose plates that had one pink rose on the side. There were only five plates and we have six people in the family, so even though they were pretty, there was no way I was going to keep those plates and hear the fights over who got to use the flower plates. Even though I have mostly boys who don’t much care for flowers, trust me, there is no limit to the things kids can find to fight over. My daughter and husband were crushed that I could bring myself to break up such pretty plates. I happily took a hammer to those plates and smashed out all future arguments.
For the bottom shelf, I had all these white plates with different textures and while I wasn’t exactly crazy about how it turned out, it was good enough and I used my little stand for a number of years. Originally, I’d planned to put this stand in my bedroom where I had hoped to have some pink in my house, but the little stand fit perfectly by the door and was the right size for holding keys and what-nots. Three moves later, my stand went from this (sorry about the bad quality):
and this:
to this:
So I Sprayed a little of this:
Then did some of this:
Followed by a little of this:
And added some of these (love Love LOVE these colors):
And ended up with this:
Isn’t she pretty?
While that all sounds pretty straight-forward, there were some hIcCuPs along the way. The scroll work on the side of the stand meant the tiles needed to hit in the right location. I grouted the top tiles fine, but the sides were tricky. I tried grout, then glue, then realized I needed to pull the side tiles off altogether and start again because they hit too low. I cut the tiles off the net backing (the backing made them want to be lower than they needed to be) and used grout to set them. This meant the grout had to be done in several steps, so most of my time went in to figuring this out.
Hubs and the Daja were sad to see the end of the roses, but we all love the new version.
Cost Breakdown:
Stand – Free
Spray Paint – Stock on Hand
Tiles – $40.00
Grout – $10.00
Total for beautiful new table – $50
Time: About 8 hours
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