What's Old is New Again.

At long last all of the bedroom furniture has been refinished and stained to match. It took 3 days but the dresser is finally finished.

This is a part of a bedroom set that has belonged to Mary's great-gandmother, grandmother, aunt & mother. Because of the finish it was considered pretty poor quality and because of many generations of chain-smokers with unruly children it was in pretty poor shape. But we dug under the surface to find something great.

I sanded off all of the old yellowed varnish, polished and sealed the old brass pulls, stained the wood a nice dark cherry red, and polyurethaned it all for a satin finish.

Here is the dresser at the start of this project. It's not as dusty as it looks.

Under the first piece I took off I found fingerprints in the dust from the past.


I then continued to take all of the pieces apart until I was just left with the skeleton of the dresser.

Underneath all that yellowing lay a nice reddish piece of wood. See below for a piece before and after sanding.

Once all the pieces had been sanded it was time to line up all the pieces in the garage to begin staining.

And then the final product.

But Why? WHY? WHYYYYY?!?!?!?

We originally thought to start this weblog as a way to share with our family all of the super fun projects on which we spend our time. Sort of a, "Hey, Mom! Look What I Did!!!" in electronic format. It's a way to compare beer-brewing techniques with the father-in-law or show Mom your latest experiment in horticulture...which is great, since, by the time she visits, the cat will probably have killed a large fraction of the house plants.

And, frankly, we have waaaay too many projects and hobbies and experiments and adventures. And we have waaaaaaay not enough attention span. So this is also a unique way, for our own sakes, to log and keep track of all of our burning irons. And maybe the ones that got a little too cooled down. And probably the ones that got all rusty because we left them out in the rain.

Let's face it: we may not even keep up with this weblog.

But we're sure excited about trying!!!