Oy vey, I don't even know where to start with this one. I don't mind a project piece, in fact, that is pretty much my jam. I love a good project piece. But the project piece is usually able to be glued back together or I transform it into something totally different. This one was just broken and it didn't have all the pieces to reconstruct it. I bought it on an online auction. One of my local auctioneers has been really successful going to online auctions. There were able to pivot during the pandemic and were able to continue their auctions. I bought a lot of stuff during the shutdown. And then, I started getting burned on a few pieces. Pieces I may have bought anyway if I had seen them in person, but I wouldn't have paid what I did if I had known what the work would entail. Fortunately, live auctions are alive and well here in Indiana and I can see what I buy now.
To be fair, the listing said, "leg needs work", which I mistakenly assumed meant it needed glued (which is an easy fix). Well, it turns out one of the legs was missing part of the leg (and it wasn't included with the table). So although the table would stand up, it was crooked.
I removed all the legs and found even more damage. Some of the legs had small parts that were separating from the legs, so they needed to be re-glued. My plan was to re-glue everything and then cut all three legs to the same length. Keep in mind, I don't have fancy, sophisticated, woodworking tools, just your basic saws and sanders.
I re-glued the small pieces and used my clamps to hold it together. This turned out to be a multi-day project!
This was as close as I got to making them similar. At this point, I was fine with trashing the whole thing, so I was just trying to "make it work."
I had to disassemble the entire table to work on it.
Then began the process of re-gluing the legs back to the base. This again took several days because each one needed to be clamped.
After several days, all three legs were reattached.
I decided to use the Rustoleum Milk Paint in Venetian Yellow. I do love the other colors of the Rustoleum Milk Paint, but this one isn't my favorite. It took four coats to get this covered. And I still didn't like it—could be that I was just tired of working on this piece. I distressed with 60 grit sandpaper and then aged with with Rustoleum Aged Glaze. That helped quite a bit. Then I sealed it with Varanthane Crystal Clear polyurethane in the Satin finish.
Now it is repaired, painted and aged. It did turn out cute, but frankly, this and others have soured me on buying furniture online without seeing it first. There is a bright spot in this story. I put it in the spring market a friend of mine does at here home on a regular basis and it was literally the first thing to sell that day. Crazy—right?
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