Glenna Rose wrote:

still love it but when grown, she'll wish it wasn't painted. Stripping
them back just isn't the same as never painting them.

Although, that's an interesting story in of itself. This thing:

http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5...h-combined.jpg

I'm at a used furniture place with my girlfriend, looking for a cheap
dresser for her apartment. (She had just graduated from RU, and she moved
into this place to stay up here near me, rather than returning home.) So I
find this cheap little thing for $20 or something, and the only thing
really wrong with it is that the knobs are broken. I make some comment
about how I can fix the knobs. A sales dude overhears.

"So, you like to restore furniture, do you?"

"Um."

"Here, have a look at this. It's solid mahogany!"

He indicates this total POS. Someone had painted it white, and someone else
had done a half ass job of stripping it. They wanted $70 for the thing,
which was a king's ransom to my girlfriend. Somehow or other I got backed
into a corner on the issue. You're a man, aren't you? Because you're a
man, you can refinish this and make something beautiful.

"Um."

So I got a refinishing book and went to town. It isn't solid, but it has a
lot of solid wood bits in the carcase. Dovetails and hardwood glides and
whatnot. It's a pretty well-constructed item overall. After I stripped
it, the wood looked really bad, so I stained it "dark walnut."

Years later, after my girlfriend had become my wife, and we had moved into a
new house, we no longer needed the dresser. One of my cousins gave us his
mother's old bedroom furniture. Some of the most gawdy, tasteless looking
stuff the '40s ever produced, but at least it all matched. A bed, two
night stands, a chifferobe and a dresser. So we stuck this dresser in the
dining room, and one of my first projects in my newly-started actual
dedicated shop (instead of my previous efforts in various kitchens and back
porches) was to build the hutch thing for the top.

So that white-painted ugly POS is what planted the first seed that lead me
to where I sit today.

I really need to learn to start taking before pictures.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/Rue/5407/
http://rosegarden.sourceforge.net/tutorial/