One man's trash is another man's treasure

A couple weeks ago while taking our morning walk, Barry and I passed an old, ugly chair sitting by the side of the road with all the other trash, waiting for garbage pickup. It was clearly an antique that had been neglected. We talked about it the rest of our walk home and decided to go back and rescue it. This picture doesn't show all the mildew and chipped paint. You can see the upholstering was a rag! It was truly ugly.

We have spent the last few weeks scraping and cleaning it. A healthy coat of oil-based primer to feed the wood was followed by 2 coats of paint. We used the same paint that will be used on all of the trim inside the Vineyard house.

Our goal is to take it to the OB house and put it in our bedroom. Since we just purchased a new bedspread for our bedroom, we decided to find material that would compliment it. The new bedspread is a coral color. I have never apholstered anything before, so this was a challenge. It may not be as great if a professional did the reconditioning, but we think it looks terrific! Hope you do too. We will use some of the extra material to make a toss pillow to go with it.

Porch benches

When we purchased our gingerbread in September, there were a pair of old benches on the porch. They were painted blue with light blue contact paper on the top and were positioned against the front railing on either side of the porch. We used them to sit on and for tables.

We brought them home to fix and paint. Over the winter, we removed the contact paper, scraped and sanded (repeatedly) and finally painted the new color of the railing, an artichoke green. Wendy finished them by stenciling flowers on the top.

Unfortunately, we did not take any before pictures but we can show you the after picture! We are looking forward to taking them back to the house, sitting on the porch in our new rockers and having a glass of wine! Hope you will join us...