Sunday, June 12, 2005

Refinish my brain, please

Remove that adhesive in two applications! Hahahaha! That darn wall took three hours of endurance scraping and endless reapplications! They really used fantastic glue, back in the day. Tough part is, it is a truly purgatorial task to remove it. But eventually, persuasive treatment with steel wool prevailed. Then I managed to eek out two cabinets of refinishing before running out of Fornby’s furniture refinisher. Now I have to find more of that stuff—they don’t sell it at Home Depot any more, so I’ll be shopping hardware stores this weekend. Still, I think I’ll be able to finish the rest of the woodworking in fairly fast fashion, though I know how this blog will start to sound:

Day 1: detailed description of refinishing the furniture

Day 2: discussion of some of the discoveries of refinishing the furniture

Day 3: rant about frustrating elements of refinishing the furniture

Day 4: poetry about refinishing furniture

Day 5: hey, I’m working on refinishing the furniture, but doing this darn task has me utterly bored, so let me tell you about the crazy things I’m thinking about while refinishing the furniture.

I’m going to stop and jump to step 5 (oh, heck, if inspiration strikes, I may even do step 4). It isn’t as if refinishing the furniture is any stupendously mysterious process. It’s the same darn process everyone uses with Fornby’s (rub in the stuff with steel wool, following the grain until its clean).. Here are the tips I have learned—wear a sealed respirator, lots of protective clothing and wield a big fan. Crank up NPR and get working!

Meanwhile, Rick removed more of the doodads on the hitch. He got everything off except the coupler, which will probably be an epic adventure.


Tow vehicle?

I ended early today at 4 pm to catch the end of my neighbor’s block party. Actually, the party ended up making our trailer efforts a bit of a tourist attraction. A couple of folks came up and started asking me questions—which I couldn’t respond to while wearing a respirator and goggles. I”d try to lift the respirator and sputter off answers—but fortunately Rick saved me and I got back to work. One guy actually came over to try to get Rick to sell him our old '49 Chrysler. Rick’s seriously considering the offer, but I do hope we still can trick it into my dream tow vehicle! Anyways, the block party was a fun take-in and we learned that there may be another vintage Airstream in Vienna.

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