Library Side Table Before and After

When my husband and I moved into our new-to-us home, we (I) decided that the dining room needed to be a library. I mean, we're never having kids. What do we need a dining room for? We eat in our breakfast room, which is much sunnier. I'll post pictures of the before and after of the library in a minute, but I've decided I'm going to Tarantino this blog and I'm going to show you the last part first -- the library side table. This is what it looked like before I fixed it.

Ew.  The evenly spaced black lines on the top, legs, and front made it look like a not-particularly-gifted eight year old attempted to distress this poor thing. I took it straight home from the antique shop I found it in, brought it into my poorly ventilated bathroom (I'm in Texas, where nobody does crafts outside because it's too effing hot), put a drop cloth under it, and got to work. This is the finished product.

I pasted book pages on the top to match my library walls and shelves. The walls are completely covered in book pages, and so are the insides of my shelves, which are repurposed drawers hung on the walls and painted the same teal color as this table. Here's a picture of the reading nook in my library with the table in it.

The papasan was a Craigslist find, and the pillow was one I wanted from Pier 1, but waited to buy until it went on clearance. I polyurenthaned the walls after pasting book pages all over them with my mom, and when I poly the table top later this week it'll look like the wall extends onto the table. I'm super happy with this redo, considering I had absolutely no luck with previous library side tables until today. Let me know what you think!