Restless Hands’ Project - 4

I’ve been meaning to write this story up for a long time and even started it but had no time and/or willpower to finish it. So I will try to do it today.

In my eight years of living in Pennsylvania I had to move five times. More often than anywhere I lived, and some of the moves were very short-term, for only a couple of months. So I’ve learned to purge stuff - you don’t want to haul a big full Penske truck every time you move.

Every time I move now, I get rid of and give away a lot of stuff and then start my hunts at thrift stores anew. I’ve been lucky to have found all the furniture I needed and even more for my refurbishing projects.

In my current apartment, the only new thing I bought is a mattress. And there’s one more thing that I’ve been taking everywhere with me - a birch-colored IKEA armchair. This $70 simple construction has a sentimental value to me: it was bestowed upon me by my friends from Kazakhstan when they were going back home. I lived in Atlanta then and when I moved to PA I took the chair with me.

It served me well for years but at some point it started shedding off its protective layer and look worn. When I moved to my current apartment I put it to the balcony that is quite narrow and has only the roof and the iron fence. So the chair got beat up by elements and burned by the sun pretty badly.

I was planning to leave it just like that as it still serves its function on warm days. I like sitting in it, reading or writing, and sipping my tea. I had an old beat up curved coffee table right next to it that was given to me by my previous neighbors when they moved to a smaller place at a 65+ community. I wasn’t planning to do anything with it either.

But then I found a trashed oak nightstand and refurbished it. Also wrote a couple of stories about it here. It freed up my long coffee table that was pretty beat up so I decided to refurbish it as well.

The long coffee table had a matching side table so I decided to work on both of them. They were made in Thailand of some local material (probably rosewood) and I couldn’t find a matching stain for them. But I was lucky enough to have found a gallon of barn-red paint at my local hardware store for like $15 and I put my hands to work.

I started out with a heavy maple stool that I’d found at Goodwill for $2 and always wanted to repaint it to be used as a stand for my pineapple plant. It was a lot of stripping of old paint and polishing but I finally got all the old brown paint off the stool. When I was painting it with the barn-red paint I noticed that it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be: the paint dried too quickly and didn’t distribute evenly, resulting in streaks. I had to be extra fast and careful with how I applied it.

Once I’ve figured it out, I gave each Thai table a couple of coats and finished with a satin polyurethane. They look nice now and I can’t find time to measure them and put them up for sale on FB Marketplace.

A gallon of paint can go far. While I was working on the tables, I decided to paint the IKEA chair and the curved coffee table as well. My new neighbor, who likes watching me and giving me all sorts of good advice while I work on my projects, said they all look much nicer now.

And I still have about a quarter of the gallon of paint left.

Here’s one of my stories about a trashed nightstand: