Dining Room Table Re-do

I was going through old pictures and found the "before's" of that crazy stencil dining room.  So I thought I'd share those, along with how I re-did that table.  It went from a table seating 4 total to a table, chairs + bench that will sit 6-8 people (depending on how many little people I can pile on that bench!) ;)
Here she is in all her final glory [after all those hours and hours of re-finishing ALL those pieces!!!] :

And coupling it with the 4 matching bar stools, I finally have a completed dining room set!  We got the table set from my in-laws when we were first married.  Within a year I spray painted it black...but I didn't know what I was doing back then and it's continued to chip and scratch over the years.

Let's journey back to the beginning, shall we?
Before:
I can't tell you how many people would walk in at this point (above) and say, "I love your table!" to which I always chuckled.  WHAT??  Seriously?!  That was my side of laziness showing, I knew sanding it would take forever (the above was after 4 hours of sanding already) so I put it off and worked on other things around the beat up ol' house.
Then I finally got smart and STRIPPED it.  Duh!!

SO much faster than sanding when you're trying to remove varnish.  Note that and save yourself T-I-M-E.

After I stained the top of the table and applied 1 coat to the chair tops, I started painting the legs and chair backs SW Sea Salt blue.  [Same color I used HERE and HERE.  Slightly obsessed] ;)

Remember the custom stamp stencil bench?  I did the same technique for the chairs but used No. 1-4, just for fun:

Left side: Applied Coat 1 of stain, then dried. I applied vinyl lettering, applied Coat 2 then picked vinyl off with tweezers.  Right side: Completed look.

I'm diggin the look right now.  What do you think?

Oh, I also found another old shot of the bay window we ripped out that I talked about HERE:

Whew! All that work and I'm finally done!

I'm always amazed how PAINT can change ANYTHING! (: