Another Lifetime to go

12th December 2022

It was our second meeting with our designer to discuss the renovation of our kitchen.

It is a lot different from when I did the kitchen in the cottage in Bradford on Avon, there I made all the decisions, but here I have to share the vision.

I think we are close to choosing the worktop colour and door design. That is a little different from what is generally available, so I may have to prototype one to see if it works.

Next on the agenda was a drive to Jenison to collect a small dresser with a badly stained wood top. It was a neat looking design that should come up smart.

We have a few projects in the garage, and Kelli was keen to get started, so before starting those we stopped off for lunch at the Way Cup cafe where I had a wheatless meal.

The spray gun was primed as soon as we got home, and dresser number one soon changed colour including staining the top. Then it was on with dresser two.

I needed to repair the bottom drawer, the metal guide rail was missing and this is essential to the smooth running of it.

I made a pair out of wood, and bonded them to the underside of the drawer bottom, this worked a treat.

11th December 2022

Well the bloody wheat embargo did not work.

Kelli couldn’t get to sleep, and when she did drop off my grunting woke her up and she could not drop off again. That of course woke me and kept me awake.

I ended up sleeping on the sofa, not a bad thing, at least we both slept for the rest of the night.

We had a number of things to do, so we needed the rest to get through the day.

First we had to deliver the second mid century dresser, I had to quickly wax the top to make it smooth, and then we loaded it into the truck.

A few minutes later we were at the house unloading it into their garage.

They had a dresser that was going to be replaced and they offered that to us for free.

One of the drawers requires a bit of work to get it running smoothly, but free is good.

We then had to drive to the north side to collect another free dresser.

The house was right on the banks of the big lake, with fantastic views right across the water.

The dresser was in really good condition, made from cedar, it’s a common design that we have sold multiple times.

We then had drove get back home to get the six chairs ready for collection.

I set them out in the driveway ready for the owner’s arrival, they were really excited to see them transformed.

Now for some reason, I thought they would throw in a few bucks to make it up to a nice round figure. They were certainly impressed with the table, and they weren’t short of a few bob judging by their home.

Imagine my disappointment when we counted out the cash, it was the exact amounted, I was gutted.

Kelli wasn’t surprised at all “ I think they were Trumpers, they hold on to their money”

Maybe because they put us on to their daughter who will be dropping off four chairs in the new year, that was enough, I guess I will get over my disappointment.

By the end of the day Kelli had stripped the paint from the dresser we collected today, and painted it already.

10th December 2022

It is a week since I started my wheat embargo.

What the heck is he doing that, I hear you ask?

Well it’s an experiment to see if I stop making a noise when I sleep. Bread, I hear causes congestion in the nasal passages, leading to a grunting noise when I breathe.

Wanting not to be the reason to stop Kelli from sleeping, I agreed to try this trial, it it’s successful then she will get good sleep, but I will have to just dream of having toast.

We finished the six dining chairs by spraying a acrylic coating over them to help give them the best protection.

I couldn’t wait to remove I’ll the masking to see how they all turned out.

It took ages, there must have been hundreds of pieces of tape that stuck to my dry fingers, they looked good, and another step closer to getting them out of the house.

We also finished one of the mid century dressers that we delivered to a house just round the corner, one more to go tomorrow.

I had spent hours polishing the brass handles, my fingers stained black, but they looked good on the finished pieces.

9th December Friday

The snow came back, it flurried down as we were spraying the top coat on the chairs.

Black is always a difficult colour to paint, everything looks covered, until it dries then you see the missed bits.

The person turned up for the small dresser, and I was glad when the cheapskate who offered a low price for the sofa table decided to pass on it. Now we will repaint the base and repost it. Sometimes we have to try different colours, some work, but this obviously didn’t.

The cabinet we bought yesterday for an existing customer was lifted out of the truck.

I removed some of the most damaged pieces around the base, this is where most of the restoration work is needed.

8th December 2023

We had another no show today, fortunately there was another person in line for it, so in retrospect it went to a better person.

Kelli sent a scathing note and blocked her from seeing our posts in the future.

Interest in our sofa table has not been good, there was someone beat us down in price, which I bitched about all evening. As if our stuff isn’t cheap already people here are as tight as a knat’s chuff.

Kelli is now used to my rants and just rolls her eyes every time, I do it mainly for fun, but this occasion I was serious.

Today was priming day for the six dining chairs. My support for painting the underside was fashioned from a cardboard tube and some 4×2 mounted on a small wheeled board.

Kelli did a great job whilst I was in charge of moving the piece around, and quality control.

Halfway through the job we had to go and collect a cabinet from a pharmacy car park.

Kelli had been talking to a regular customer who wanted a furniture piece that had drawers and doors, and she found one. It will require a bit of work to turn it into a gem, but that’s what we do.

Later we went downtown for a pizza, a treat for all the things we did this week.

7th December 2022

I had my own space for the day. Kelli was going shopping with Greer so I had the garage all to myself. I was playing my old git’s music at full volume, it was great.

However what I had to do was not fun. There were two chairs that had to be sanded, so the sore thumbs were hurting at the end of the day.

The news was all about the run offs in Georgia, fortunately it was won by a candidate who could string a sentence together compared with an ex football star who couldn’t.

The state of American politics is bad, the Republican Party is full of weirdos and slimeballs, and worst of all, they still support Trump.

It was disclosed yesterday that his business has been found guilty of tax evasion and false accounting. That master criminal has not yet been implicated when it was obvious that he has the final say in every business decision.

Anyone else would be in prison in a shot, two levels of law in this country.

We finished another dresser, dragging it inside to take pictures.

6th December 2022

It was quite a present day, we were able to have the garage door open. This was just as well because Kelli had a lot of spraying to do.

I released all the clamps from the small top I had laid up yesterday. For some reason there were a few bumps in the veneer that I was able to flatten out with a hot iron, so I manage to rescue it.

Then it was down to stripping the last two drawers for the long mid century dresser that we had already sold.

If the pain of doing that wasn’t enough there were the dining chairs.

I have sanded three of the six, and the split on my thumb was making it difficult.

It was a grim reminder that this is the season when the liquid bandage bottle is in permanent view.

5th December 2022

We sold the cane chair that we picked up from the side of the road. A lady arrived at 10.30am to view it, and after a brilliant sales pitch from Kelli, she handed over the readies.

The rest of the day was a blur, so much seemed to be done. We picked up a small dresser from our storage unit, swapping it for the heavy coffee table. This would keep Kelli busy, while I did some repairs to the dresser we painted yesterday. I had a number of drawers to polyurethane, so our dining table doubled as a drying surface.

I finally got round to gluing a veneer to a small side table top. It had been laying around for a week and I kept catching it, damaging the edges of the veneer. So it was brilliant to get that done.

We have a possible commission for stripping more chairs. The daughter of the people we are painting the dining chairs has four that she wants taken back to raw wood and lacquered.

Kelli fired off a quotation, that was higher that the dining chairs, and that was met with a positive result.

4th December 2022

After a sleepless night we both didn’t feel like hosting Greer’s birthday cake fest.

What sleep we had was wholly inadequate, but a commitment is a commitment.

We were given numbers for the family gathering that meant we had to make some snacks as a prequel to the cake cutting.

As the time ticked away we waited for the hordes to descend. The expectation of twelve bodied ended up as six, so a anticlimax to say the least. The snacks were delicious and quickly eaten, and I cut the cake exceptionally large. For some reason the usual slice size is so thin that it’s difficult to know that you’ve eaten anything.

The group then broke up and we crashed out for the rest of the evening, although I spent a couple of hours masking two chairs ready for sanding.

I felt better after doing that, as it wasn’t a totally wasted day.

3rd December 2022

It seems that we are on a “free furniture “ hunt.

Today we drove to collect a glass topped coffee table minus the glass, I guess that was why it was free. It was a heavy beast, and I’m not sure what we are going to do with it.

I know, let’s get a piece of glass cut!

It was another cold day, and I’m fed up with it already. I can imaging there is someone in Africa who is fed up with it being hot all the time, so it’s all about geography.

We did stuff in the garage, fitting the top to the sofa table, second coat of paint to the stools and Kelli primed the first of the mid century dressers.

In the evening we dressed the skinny Christmas tree, the first time the decorations did not include Greer’s and Cameron’s. Fortunately the tree looks fine.