Finally finished with the mega-gazillion dollar coffee table

Here it is folks. The moment you've been waiting for. Here is the coffee table I've stressed over for the past few weeks. This coffee table belonged to Hubby. When we re-did our living room, it was just about the only really ugly thing left in the room. I decided something should be done about it, and spent some time trying to decide if I should mosaic it, mod podge pictures on it, etc, etc. Hubby and I went to an open house at a vineyard nearby on Mother's Day, and there were crafters there. We met up with Rick Gates of Premier Imprints, and we were stunned at the beautiful tiles he could make with your very own pictures. After a series of emails, and some decision-making on what picture we wanted, we contracted Rick to make our tiles for us. The picture is one of the most photographed and painted buildings in New England. It is called Motif #1, and is on the shore in Rockport, MA. Even though there are many photographs of this building out on the web, the picture on the coffee table is one we took ourselves. We had to take the coffee table apart, sand it and re-stain it. I bought new legs for it, because I figured it would be way too much work to sand the old legs. Hubby bought new brackets to afix the legs. We used tile cement to anchor the tiles in place, then had to find something to fill in the area not covered by the tiles. After a lengthy discussion at Lowe's and Home Depot, we chose flat rocks that would normally be used to make a floor, and interspersed it with some shells, rocks and sand-dollars we'd found while walking out on the coast of New England. Finally, we covered the whole thing with a piece of plexi-glass to protect it. And here's the finished product: