funny

Okay, so some time has passed since the repaired and refinished furniture came back to my precincts. Today I’m feeling quite a lot better about the stuff.

Polishing the refinished Ethan Allen table with paste wax and then with Old English and Weiman’s  lemon oil actually did resolve the problem. As these products kind of sank in to the grain, that table began to look pretty darned good. The foggy and spotty effect has gone away, and what remains is a richly glowing natural grain. The tabletop consists of narrow planks that were joined together without regard to how the wood grain might match — because of course Ethan Allen would stain it a brown so dark as to be almost black and then apply a high-gloss varnish, obscuring the grain. But in a way, the randomly variegated grain creates an interesting and handsome effect.

So that turned out to be pretty good.

As for the chairs:

They’re a little lighter than I’d like.

However, the Watco oil with the “cherry” stain in it was a little more ridiculous than I’d like… “Cherry” turns out to be approximately the shade of that fake redwood stain people paint on their outdoor decks. Decided applying that stuff would be ill advised.

Before driving up to Home Depot to look for another color, I called the furniture repair guys and asked how they’d finished the pieces, dissembling my reason for inquiring by saying I wanted to know how best to care for the stuff. Manny said they’d applied paste wax to all three pieces.

Thought so.

The prospect of bathing both those chairs, each with 13 spindles, in mineral spirits did not appeal.

Really did not appeal.

By light of day (or was it light of reason?), I realized the color wasn’t that far off from the older chairs that had been refinished some 35 years ago.

Naturally, those chairs would have darkened over time. These probably will, too. Not that I’ll live another 35 years to see it.

Speaking of this, my son and heir dropped by last night. And — get this! — he didn’t notice the difference!

{chortle!} I pointed out the refinishing job to him without editorial comment. He thought the stuff looked great! And apparently he truly couldn’t tell much difference in the chairs.

If the de facto owner thinks they look fine, who am I to complain?

I laid on a layer of butcher’s wax, followed by three coats of furniture oil. And they look OK. Considering how old they are and how violently they’ve been abused, they’re probably as good as they’re gonna get. With the Navajo rug draped over the one chair that resides in the dining room, it looks just fine. And since only the dog visits the bedroom, where the other one lives, WGAS?

All this thrashing around delayed another project: I’d agreed to do a webinar on editing for a local publishers’ group, as a freebie — a favor to a friend. Though what needed to be done was all mapped out, I still needed to create a slide show and a script.

Because I found the prospect of oiling furniture a hell of a lot more interesting than sitting in front of a computer for god only knew how many hours, I got sidetracked from PowerPoint.

When I finally sat down to work, I just turned on the computer and PLINK! The power went out.

They’re building the damn lightrail up the main drag just to the west of us, creating vast chaos. I figured the workers had hit an electric line — when they ran the thing past my son’s house, the power, water, and gas were constantly going out.

Exceptionally annoyed, I felt a bad thought enter my mind: I had never violated the city’s laws by carrying an alcoholic drink into the park. So I poured a bourbon and water into a coffee mug, lashed up the dog in a collar and leash, and headed out.

The streets — all of them! — were overrun with traffic. Apparently they were diverting people off said main drag, or so I thought. Stopped to chat with the neighbors. Moved on.

Cassie didn’t want to go in the direction of the park, and neither did I, since it didn’t look like we could make our way across the roads clogged with hordes of confused and angry-looking drivers. So instead we wandered into the neighborhood to the south.

There, in the quietest and most dead-end corner of the ’hood, what should we come across but these people standing by the side of the road, looking stressed and unhappy. Incredibly, a car of genteel-looking old folks had crashed into a lawn dude’s truck and trailer. This encounter smushed in the front end of the old folks’ vehicle; barely scratched the Sanford & Sons-style truck. They were unhappy because the lawn dude didn’t have a driver’s license (and, you can bet, didn’t have insurance, either). He was unhappy because he was no doubt about to be deported.

How can you run into each other on a tiny neighborhood lane where you have noplace to go — it’s not a through street, for godsake — and where you should be driving about 10 mph??

At any rate, they reported on the cause of the power outage. They were on Northern when they witnessed a wreck: “When we saw the power pole coming down, we thought it looked pretty bad.” All the people charging through the neighborhood were being diverted off Northern, one of the busiest streets in the city.

By the time Cassie and I wandered back to the house, the lights were back on.

Powered up the iMac, which came on without much complaint but was a hassle because Word recovered all or most of the files that were sitting open and re-opened them with no names. Takes forever to figure out what they were called and where they were stashed and resave them under the correct filenames.

But the MacBook, which I wanted to use so I could sit in an easy chair because my back and leg hurt like hell every time I sit in this desk chair, would not come on!

It just sat there whirring its goddamn gear-shaped mandala.

This was a problem, because the most recent version of a document I needed was on that computer, and because it wasn’t coming up on DropBox.

Finally I gave up trying to reboot and just let it sit there and whir away while I wrestled with Word, Excel, and Preview files.

About then the phone rang: M’hijito. He wanted to take me to dinner!

I never say no to an offer like that. Besides, he couldn’t have called more serendipitously: here was a man who could get the MacBook running again, if anyone this side of the Genius Bar could.

By the time my son showed up at the door, the laptop had come back on…but it had lost its wireless connection. He got it back online, and then we headed for a restaurant.

So I didn’t get started until after dark. And it was quarter to one in the morning by the time I finished the twenty-slide PowerPoint presentation and its accompanying script. I have NO idea how long it will take…went to bed before rehearsing it.

I doubt if we’ll get any business from this. Unless I’m mistaken, this group consists pretty much of the same set who made up the defunct Arizona book publishers’ association, whose members are not prepared to pay a living wage to contract editors. That’s why we’ve been targeting corporate work: Tina and I need to put food on our tables. But things are pretty slow just now — for reasons I don’t understand, all the work comes in at once, so we’re invariably faced with a gigantic crush, and then we have a month or two with nothing to do. So I can afford to donate my time.

Who knows? Maybe something will come of it.

Meanwhile, though, I’m feeling a lot better about the furniture. That’s something.

 

 

 

{sigh} Couple weeks ago, one of my mother’s Conant Ball chairs, which she bought in San Francisco when we came back to the States from the Middle East in the late 1950s, broke. A piece of wood that supported the legs dried out and finally gave way.

It and its partner needed some work, anyway. Not knowing how much she must have spent on the stuff, my father decided to make the dining set they belonged to into outdoor furniture. The house they moved into in Sun City didn’t have room to accommodate a dining-room set and a television, and my father certainly could not be expected to live without his TV. So he covered the solid birch table and six chairs with layer on layer on layer of polyurethane. Then he stuck them out on the screened-in porch, where they resided for the rest of my mother’s life — about 15 years.

To give you a clue to the enormity of this act, Thomas Moser makes chairs that look very much like them:

$1,075 for the side chair on the left.

$1,225. That’s right: apiece.

Admittedly, the Moser chairs are made of cherry and ash, not birch. But they look very much like the chairs my mother bought in San Francisco, back in 1957. They’re almost identical, except that my mother’s side chairs had padded seat cushions.

After my mother died, my father moved to an old-folkerie and gave me the set. A friend stripped the polyurethane off the table and the side chairs and I refinished them with Watco’s lightly stained Danish oil. This looked OK. A helluva lot better than yellow varnish, anyway. But Friend tired of the job before he finished the captain’s chairs, so they stayed covered in polyurethane.

Obviously, I can’t afford to replace them. Not even at the 15 percent discount Thos. Moser is offering just this moment.

So, I took the occasion of the busted leg to ask the furniture repair guys I’d found through Angie’s list not only to repair the leg assembly but also to strip and refinish the both captain’s chairs, and while they were at it, to strip and refinish the scratched-up Ethan Allen coffee table I’d never been very satisfied with. So they carted it off the end of last month.

They delivered the finished job today.

I didn’t expect perfection. The chairs are very old, and 15 years out in the heat, the dust, and the rain couldn’t have helped them, embalmed in polyurethane or not. And the table is just a mass-produced thing not designed for a hand-rubbed oil finish. But the chairs’ cirrhosis-yellow varnish and the scratched-up shiny surface of the table have annoyed me for years. So I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And perfection is decidedly not what I got.

I can’t imagine what they did to remove the table’s finish, but it looks like they scraped at it with some sort of tool like a spackling knife. The surface has patches of small abrasions — doesn’t look like sandpaper marks, at least not from a circular sander (which one would hope they’d know better than to use). Overall they did a nice job of sanding — all three pieces are satin-smooth to the touch. It’s possible, in fact, that they oversanded: if you sand with too fine a grade of sandpaper and steel wool, Danish oil won’t soak in the way it’s supposed to.

At any rate, it looked mighty sad after they’d plopped it down in the living room. Yet, interestingly, they’d done an amazingly good job of imitating the color and finish of the Stickley table that lives next to the couch.

The chairs are pretty pale and wan: looks like they only applied one coat of Watco. To do the job right requires several coats. But it’s just as well, because I think they used a walnut color, which is decidedly not what was on the other chairs. Watco’s “cherry” version would come fairly close to the oil I used in the 70s to refinish the side chairs and table. If they’d done the job right, the result would have been way too dark.

Studied the table for a while. Then decided to try a coat of butcher’s wax, which I happened to have lurking in a closet. Applied three coats.

This helped a little, but not enough. Waxing brought out several splotches where it looked like the wood might have gotten wet after they’d stripped it. We’ve had a lot of rain, and it sure could be that their roof leaked or someone walked past it dripping water. Whatever, this was annoying.

Once the wax was dry and polished as well as it was going to be polished — which wasn’t very — I applied some furniture oil. Put on a couple of coats of English oil, which helped more than I expected. Then I came across an old bottle of Weiman’s lemon oil in the cleaning closet. Weiman’s is a superior product, so I figured, why not? Applied another coat of that oil.

And that did make a big difference. It looks much, much better. Not perfect. But perfection clearly is not attainable here.

By the light of an incandescent lamp, it actually looks pretty good. (As usual, you’re gonna have to click on the image to get anything resembling resolution out of WordPress…) But view it by sunlight from an angle, and the effect is somewhat cloudy and blotchy.

Oh well.

Now, as for the chairs…what to do?

While I was out replenishing the larder yesterday, I dropped by the Home Depot and picked up a can of Watco oil laced with “cherry” stain.

Before applying that, though, I’ve got to figure out what our boys did in their refinishing effort. If they applied wax, I’ll have to get that off before rubbing in another three, four, or five coats of Watco. The chairs don’t smell of paste wax. But the guys called me about a week ago asking to deliver them; I put this off until today, because I wanted to push the payment into a new AMEX billing cycle, so as to be able to cover it out of cash flow rather than having to raid savings. The odor of wax could have dissipated by now.

It is going to take for-fucking-EVER to do the job right on those chairs, with all those damn spindles. This project will have to wait until I finish a dog-and-pony show I have to write and trick out in PowerPoint for a webinar a local writer’s & self-publisher’s group asked me to do. I’m not getting paid, but we could pick up some work — I doubt it, though, because my experience with these folks is that they don’t have the money to pay professional rates.

At any rate, though my heart’s not exactly broken, neither am I pleased. This job cost $800, and so I’d just as soon not have to do it over myself to get it right.

On the other hand, just to replace the two captain’s chairs (to say nothing of the table) would cost three times that much. To extract the coffee table from Thos. Moser would cost another $1,250. So if I can get all three pieces to look acceptable, I suppose I can’t complain.

You get what you pay for…