Wednesday, December 7, 2011

The Table part 1

This may or may not be sacrilegious to some artists but...I got rid of my old drafting table.  It was all for a good cause though! Because I really needed room for my newest find - This lovely old girl!


(Okay well trust me, the charm is under the grime...)

So here's the story... My grandmother is moving out of her house and its a pretty big place (I think 7 out of 9 of my aunts/uncles lived there at one point of time) It also doesn't help that I think I got my touch of pack rat tendencies from that side of the family, so the house was still pretty well furnished with odds and ends.

The Table was actually found in a shed hidden in the backyard and the strangest thing is that my grandma doesn't even recognize it.  My guess is that my grandfather might have found it in the trash at some point in time (another trait I picked up) and stuck it in the shed and forgot about it.  We think it may be from the 1950s (this is going on my mom's Antique Roadshow knowledge which I have to say is pretty legit)  

After a rocky move, which involved an open car trunk and me holding on to The Table while my mom drove, washing off and scrubbing down the table was one of the most satisfying things I've done in a long time.


I wasn't there for the unearthing of it but apparently some mice made a home out of the drawers and it looked like some hungry termites might have gotten to the legs so I took it upon myself to give the whole thing another good scrub but this time with a bleach solution.

The thing that really drew me to The Table had to be the table top - I think it's made of porcelain but it's got this strange silhouette scene inlaid into it that's just so bizarre that I can't help but think of a story every time I look at it.



Day two was sanding day - Which as it turns out, is a pretty darn good upper arm workout! I was throughly surprised to find a white coat underneath the green paint and even more surprised that even with me putting some elbow grease into my sanding - it was a real pain to get down to the wood so I decided to cut my chances and just take off the top coat. To finish out the day I used some wood filler to fix up the legs where the termites had nibbled on, let it dry and then sanded again to fix up the wood filler. 



To be continued in The Table... part 2! (dun dun DUN!)

1 comment:

  1. holy crap..what a find, lindsay! it looks to me like it's an enamel top, but it's hard to tell for sure from the photos. those were common in the 50s (like your mom said) but i've usually seen them with metal bases and legs. a good example here:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/90096064@N00/286181678/

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