Second-Hand Project

In our second-hand store searches, we've sort of made friends with the owner of one of our favorites. It's not that we buy a lot from this place (or any place, really) but the people that run this particular place are more particular about what they buy and sell. And they price to SELL. And seem to love to bargain.

Our favorite store was moving though, due to expensive rent in an area that had frequent break-ins. SO he had a "garage sale". (A term that, here, seems to apply to businesses as well as homes. As long as you have a garage and it's open, you can have a garage sale.) The more he sold or got rid of, the cheaper and easier it would be for him to move locations.

As I said, frequent drop-ins to his store has made us somewhat familiar with each other. He's even stopped us to talk about how we met, got married, told us about his own New York girlfriend... he's nice, and remembers us. So when we went in to his garage sale, he GAVE us six chairs because we said we were looking for one.

They're not great chairs, and are pretty wobbly in fact. And it looks like they were someone else's refinishing project at some point, as only two were sanded down to bare timber, and the rest are stained a kind of redish brown.

But they're chairs, they were free, and we put them to good use. After, of course, I got m y crafty little hands on them.

Turns out, spray paint was on sale. So for $10, we bought enough paint to do 2 to 3 of the chairs, to do a little experiment I had in mind.

First, layer of blue.

I intended to put on a layer of off-white, and then sand it down in a few places, around the edges, so you could see the blue. But, probably because I didn't use a primer, or for some reason that paint does stuff like this, the off-white layer ended up splotchy.

Not the neat "wear and tear" look I was going for, but it saved me from having to spend hours sanding, and, my husband and I think, looks pretty nice the way it turned out. We like the blue more than the white anyway.

I only managed to finish two of the chairs before things like canning apples, blackberry jam, and cleaning up the gardens took up my time and I have to wait for a later date to finish the other four.






What are we doing with two worn looking chairs? At the moment, they're making some interesting and lovely looking bedside tables in our guestrooms.