Fix-up Mini-Frenzy

How d’you like the flower that popped up in the backyard? Some kind of day-lily, I think. It picks up the colors in the Slave Labor cover, so I stuck it in FaM’s banner, for the nonce.

Welp, yesterday it was time to get to work with the little B&D “Mouse” sander I picked up at the Depot during the most recent spending spree. Ain’t he the cutest li’l guy?

You know, back in the Day when I was a young pup, I was surprisingly good with a sander. For a girl. 😉 I liked to refinish and, at one point, to build furniture. Plus we lived in a historic neighborhood, and the house needed shoring up all the time. Ex-DH was good at earning a living but not so clever with tools — as a practical matter, I think, he felt that the highest and best use for some of that wealth was hiring other people to do the work.

But my father was a putterer and a hobbyist handyman, and his cast of mind must have come down to me in the genes: I couldn’t stand it. So I would do a lot of the repairs and fix-up around the house.

Later, when we moved to a neighborhood more amenable to raising children, we lived in a somewhat newer house that had lent itself to fewer small repairs. Jobs that needed to be done called for master craftsmen, not for a girl with a screwdriver, a saw, and a hammer. Plus I didn’t much like the house and so rarely felt moved to launch elaborate projects. When I exited, I left most of my tools behind, including a very nice electric sander.

The “Mouse” gadget can’t hold a candle to that thing. It’s designed for small detail work. But the price was right, and so was the project.

Yes: the project. What we have here is a little Doobie Damage, occasioned when Ruby Doo realized she could eat the runners off the rockers that live on the westside deck:

Isn’t that charming? She chewed the back ends of all four runners on the two wicker chairs.

The chairs are real wicker, not that new weatherproof plastic stuff. I’ve had them for, oh…maybe 15 or 20 years. Bought them in the old house, dragged them over here, and happily placed them in the Leafy Bower that is the covered deck. They pose a couple of challenges: they have to be hauled indoors whenever it rains, and they really should be spray-painted once a year.

As a practical matter, I’ve painted them three times before this. So they were looking pretty tired.

I like these chairs. A lot. They’re comfortable. Wicker gives when you sit on it. That plastic stuff does not. I’ve looked at outdoor fake-wicker rockers at just about everyplace over the years: at Pier 1 (the home of these venerable and time-worn objects), at Cost Plus, at Home Depot, at Lowe’s, at Crate & Barrel. To a chair, they’re uncomfortable. And the price? Holy mackerel!

Pier 1 wants $161 apiece — $320+ to replace these two chairs — and they’re not as nice-looking, nor are they anything you’d want to sit in for more than about three minutes. Crate & Barrel is offering theirs on sale for $399 apiece, apparently having failed to extract $599 from their customer base. Home Depot wants $164 for a truly ugly swiveling thing that requires not one but two cushions for which you will pay extra, but they’re selling something that looks an awful lot like Pier 1’s for a mere $139. Lowe’s has a wider selection, but the only one that resembles these (whose style I happen to like) goes for $229 — almost $500 to replace the two of them!!!

So it makes the cost of six cans of Ace’s best cheap white enamel gloss and a little Black & Decker sander look like a bargain.

The sander worked pretty well to smooth off the worst of the gnaw marks. Also used it to knock down the worst of the peeling paint. I didn’t try to sand all the paint off or even to make it especially smooth — the rockers are made of some kind of soft wood, which likely won’t stand up to a lot of electric sanding. Plus I kind of like the rustic look…it has a sort of beach-house style about it.

Yeah, I know: shabby chic has had its day — mercifully, a short one.

Some spackling compound was laying around the paint cabinet. Bought that a while back by way of repairing the hole in the wall where the front door bashed the drywall.

Previous owners… Always, always inexplicably weird. You know, Satan (or one of his predecessors) installed door bumpers for every single one of the interior doors. Why do you suppose he didn’t put in one for the front door, which is the door that’s most likely to slam against a wall?

So that was quite the repair job. That idiot. Anyway, it’s always nice to have a spackling compound around the house.

Used it to fill that big crack and the little fang holes that couldn’t reasonably be sanded down without sanding off the whole damn runner. Also found, interestingly, that I could use it to mold a shape for the most badly damaged runner. While it’s not exactly the same as the others, it’s good enough for government work. And certainly not something that I feel impelled to spend $500 to replace…

Next: spray-paint those chairs till I was blue in the face!

Literally, no doubt. I hate working with that stuff. It brings to mind an image of the inside of a pair of lungs coated with quick-dry enamel.

And it’s wasteful. Extravagantly, ridiculously wasteful. Twice as much paint floats off into the atmosphere as gets on the object you’re trying to cover. But it’s not very practical to try to paint wicker with a brush, soo…

No matter how still the day is — and yesterday was suitably still — there’s always some prevailing air flow. When you’re downwind, you kind of have to hold your breath as you spray and then step out of the drifting cloud every minute or so to draw a breath of relatively clean air. I hate that. No. I didn’t have a mask and I’ve never found them to be very effective anyway because they knock my glasses around so I can’t see what I’m doing and they don’t fit tight on your face and when it’s 100 degrees outside (as it was yesterday) you can’t bear to keep them on. The alternative strategy: just don’t breathe.

At any rate, it took six (6!) cans of Ace’s best to coat those damn chairs, what with the chewed-up runners and the manifold places where the old paint had chipped off the wicker. By about 8 or 9 p.m., they were back on the deck to dry…

The trees in the side yard shed a phenomenal amount of debris. The paloverde is still dropping spent blossoms, and the accursed willow acacia never quits dropping junk. Right now it’s pods. Billions and billions of pods. Was going to place the chairs in the garage to dry overnight. But as I was hauling one in there, toluene-laden paint fumes rising off its wicker surface to gag me, I happened to glance at the gas water heater… Uh oh!

Carry chair and its fumes back outdoors, double-time.

Of course I couldn’t leave them in the front yard, where this paint job took place — they’d be gone well before dawn. So had to haul them into the backyard and let them sit on the deck, hoping they wouldn’t be covered with tree trash by morning.

They weren’t.

And so here they are, adorned with a couple of the new Pier 1 cushions, also acquired during said spending spree:

Not bad, I’d say, for a $300 saving.