I Wanna Rock

Seems like there is a theme recently of baby furniture, no? Well if there wasn't before, there will be now, because we found this old miniature rocking chair at an estate sale a few weeks ago, and it was begging for some TLC and a new home. I was happy to oblige. (semi-related editor's note: if I don't find something to do with all of these projects I have been completing, I might get kicked out of the house. Can I live with one of you for a while?)

This wasn't the worst it looked

I think it is important to point out here that, since I started this hobby back in the fall, the only thing furniture making/antiquing/restoring I have actually gotten WORSE at is taking photos. I just flat-out forgot to take a before pic of this beauty. The photo you see above was actually taken mid-project, after I had already done a ton of work to fix it up. You probably don't appreciate that because you can't see what it looked like before I started. To give you an idea, I paid all of $3 for the chair, a can of square nails bigger than Tyra Banks' forehead, an old hand drill and a screwdriver. So, if you're keeping score at home, I paid roughly less than $1 for the chair. Less than a penny if you count each nail individually, but you probably get the point.

I get why too. the thing was a piece of crap. Scratched and gouged? Check. Speckled with a rainbow coalition of paints? Check. Broken legs? Double check. So, the pic you see above is less than a "before" pic and more of a "oh crap, I'm halfway through this and need to take a photo before this thing looks beautimous" panic pic. I fixed the legs (no small task), took the sheen off with some TSP solution, and sanded the scratches out of the seat.

The scratched seat turned out to be a blessing in disguise because if I didn't have to sand it down, I wouldn't have ended up with the two-tone effect you see above. As has happened with most things I work on that turn out well, I completely fell into this one ass-backwards by accident. I stained it to make it match the rest of the chair so the top coat of paint I put on would look uniform. But I liked the way the stain (Minwax Early American in case you were wondering) looked so much that I said to hell with common sense, this sucker's gonna have an identity crisis. Am I painted or am I stained? Doesn't matter, cause I look awesome.

In your face, extreme close-up style