Beginning and During.
Ow. I used my new tool, which I want to call a mattock because that's a cool word that distinguishes the thing from "garden trowel" though unfortunately is incorrect, to dig out the grass in the north easement to place "stones," and in the south easement to dig out the fragments of flagstones I had previously used as a border. I guess I grip with my index and middle fingers the most, because I wound up with a blister on the ring side of my middle finger. For best gription, I used gloves to place the stones--prefab, concretey foot-squares—along the curb in both easements. Then I started stripping a table, and the taut blister popped (without my help this time, I promise) perhaps when mineral spirits dried out the skin just enough, and yowza, that hurt. So of course I trimmed all the dead skin away, because it could not protect the bed of the blister, and I am continuing to work with my hands, continuing with alcohol, so I have acquired as well a few slits in the exposed blister bed. Yum.
On the other hand, I did get a large mailing out with only one paper cut across the knuckle of my left pinky, and without aggravating the post-blister much.
The stripping is going okay, I guess. I have never used chemicals to strip finish before and the only time I have stripped (began to strip) a piece of furniture at all, I was a child and used sandpaper and gave up and to this day in my mother's house there is a bed table none of whose surfaces are protected by finish--except that of the face of the drawer--and have not been for 25 years.
Whoever last worked with this table had no taste. It is stained so dark it might as well have been painted black. The citrus-y chemical worked really well to lift most of that out. There are two half-oval flaps, a top a foot across, a drawer, and the legs. The flaps and top are fine. In fact they're lovely. I still don't know what kind of wood they are, but when wet--can you say wet when it's not water?--with mineral spirits, the color is lovely. The finish I cannot get out (three applications of stripper so far) I am calling "grain enhancements." The legs, though, the legs make me very sad. There are six fixed and two that rotate 90 degrees each to hold up a flap. The eight legs and attendant railings are turned, or look like it, so have waists and fatter bits and narrower bits and rings and they are not my favorites. The fattest part of any round section shed its finish fairly well, but the narrow waists and in-curvings that expose more grain, not so much. And they take so damn long, painting the chemical on, scrubbing and rubbing it out.
I am using up so many rags on this endeavor. The entire under-utility-sink cabinet in the laundry room was a pile of rags--clean, so hopefully no more a fire nest than a closet full of clothes--that I was going to, get this, fold before my mother's visit. (I folded the painting dropcloths tidily into a box in the coal cellar, instead of just heaping them on the floor.) Now I don't have to because I doubt they can come clean. It seems a pity to destroy RDC's worn to shreds "This is your brain on Rasta" t-shirt for this, but so it goes. Also we've been getting the Denver Post, no idea why, for the past several weeks, free to the door, but since The Chronicle of Higher Education is exactly the size of Blake's cage floor, I don't need the local rag. But whatever doesn't get recycled gets stripper with dissolved finish dripped on it.
After
The Saga of the Table began before my involvement. My mother had it from one of her grandmothers, I think the paternal one. When my sister moved to Boston, she was allowed to use it there but returned it before she moved to Aspen, though whether by my mother's request or my sister's choice I don't know.
What I do know is that when RDC and I moved in together, my mother lent us a lamp. She was careful to say it was a loan, and it was a lamp from my sister's abandoned bedroom that she surely did not miss in the 2.5 years we had it. I returned it before we moved to Denver because I wasn't going to bring a loan across the country. I was careful to return my mother's loan because even her gifts have been chancy: she suggested that the heirloom china she gave me at my bridal shower should not go with me to Denver, and if a gift was that susceptible to her whim and regret, then a loan was even more so.
I told how the thing came to be in my possession here, and how my mother first began to hint of its return here, and how when we bought a house with a dining room and acquired a dining table of suitable size and retired the two-person, dropleaf gateleg table, she was offended. Further gibes occurred when she looked at photographs of the house and later when I told her about the house falling over into a swamp: when I told her about the disintegrating concrete and support posts and lolly columns, she asked, "And where is the gateleg table in all of this?" I bitched to my sister about that selfish insensitivity, and I should have bitched to the transgressor, because CLH put herself (did I hint that I wanted her to do this? I hope not) in the middle by telling our mother how inappropriate a question about a single piece of furniture is in the context of the structural integrity of an entire house. She reportedly replied, "But I wanted her to know I was concerned about my table!" to which my sister reasonably replied, "She would have appreciated your having some concern for her house" without adding "especially on her birthday" or bickering about the possessive pronoun.
The table was stained very dark. I don't like dark colors except black in dogs and dark brown in eyes. I like wood grain. So I stripped the thing and finished it clear.
The table is handsome now. The leaves and top glow with mahogany--when I brought the top to a woodworking store, they identified it as such. Its turned legs were a bitch to strip--I discovered sanding floss, a wonderful invention--and where the shape cuts across grain, some stain remains, and that's true of the edges of the leaves and top too (but as with an old refinished floor, I'm calling that "character"). Also, a page about Victrolas makes me think that the top might be of red mahogany and the legs of brown, because they do look quite different.
Attractive or not, its legs are still turned, and therefore dustcatchers, and it's still an occasional table, though for what occasions I'm not sure. Now that I know how easy it is to dismantle, I might declare the project's aim not merely to improve the appearance of a piece whose purpose eludes me and whose design fails to thrill me but to furnish my sister's new house. But I will check whether my sister would consider the table merely a mathom. If I didn't find an occasion for it in my house, I can't assume she would.