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From start to refinish
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| Grace Christianson works on a piano that she and her husband brought to Cam-plex for a Furniture Refinishing Workshop that started on Tuesday. “It’s nice to take something yucky and old and turn it into something nice,” Christianson said. - News-Record photos by Matt McKnight |
By NATHAN PAYNE, News-Record City Editor npayne@gillettenewsrecord.net
The hum of an orbital sander echoes in the far corner of the Cam-plex Central Pavilion while a few heads bob up and down over the top of a graveyard of furniture.Some people wear masks, most have gloves and all eyes water a little from the biting fumes of paint-stripping chemicals that hang in the air.
They come together each day to linger over the graveyard of furniture — the family heirloom, the flea market find or the Dumpster treasure. Each piece has a history that will be uncovered one layer of paint or varnish at a time during the next 13 days of the annual Furniture Refinishing Workshop.
The beginner
Inside bright orange rubber gloves, Carol Leslie’s hands shake while she scrapes the first coats of stripper from a small antique wash basin. The brown goo gives way to a light hardwood with a tight grain. A few other women at the workshop just left her booth after giving tips about what brushes to use on the wood to clean it without leaving scrapes.
She is nervous. It is her first time refinishing a piece of furniture and she wonders why she picked a family heirloom to start on.
The small cabinet belonged to her husband’s grandmother and it is in rough shape. The finish is dark with age on the flat surfaces and black in the grooves on the doors. There is a sliver of wood that cracked off of one of the door panels and was glued back in place years ago.
Within a day of starting her project, Leslie sits on the floor near the carcass of the cabinet with a brush as she strips glue and varnish from the pieces of the doors and drawer. She is frustrated. She thought she was done stripping, but then Steve Bricker helped her disassemble the doors and showed her more parts that need to be cleaned.
“Every time you feel like you’ve got a handle on it, something else comes up,” she said. “It really is overwhelming.”
She gets plenty of help, though. Most of the 52 people renting space during the workshop are experienced and have participated several times before. “I would be nowhere if all these people weren’t here to help,” Leslie said. “I love it.”
During the evening of her first day stripping, a passer-by stopped and told her that her cabinet was made in the 1860s based on the style of dovetail used to make the drawers.
Knowing that it was so old gave her an impetus to continue her arduous work.
Preserving legacy
Nearby, Jim Slattery paints a new coat of varnish onto what, from a distance, looks like an antique children’s’ chair. When he lifts it from his table, it becomes obvious that the tiny wooden perch is an antique potty chair. His rough ranch-worn hands gently place the throne back on the table.
Jim and his wife, Nancy, have not bought a new piece of furniture in 30 years. Almost everything they own are pieces handed down through generations and rebuilt or refinished by them.
“It is something that I really get a kick out of,” Slattery said. “If it is halfway saveable, I will save it.”
The chair is a family relic that came to Wyoming with his wife’s great-grandmother in 1886. Since then, 28 kids have learned to do their business on it.
Five other members of the Slattery clan and a few of their neighbors fill the center of Central Pavilion. Jim can be found in the middle of the mix almost anytime either working on his pieces or doing favors for family members by applying coats of stripper before they arrive to give them a head start.
Each year the Slatterys’ children expect a new piece of old furniture from Jim’s projects at the workshop. He often works on multiple pieces at once in his booth.
“Sometimes I get too many going,” he said while scraping paint and stripper from a niece’s end table.
Help is one thing he gives more than he receives.
A helping hand
Along the north wall, across from where Slattery is scraping paint from an end table, Dave Capps shows off his carriage to a few friends. Capps is breaking the norm for the workshop by bringing a wood-wheeled wagon and not a piece of furniture.
As one of the event coordinators, he spends a lot of his time helping other people. It is a nice change of pace from his day job at a local mine.
“I blow things up for a living, so on my off days I like to put ’em back together,” Capps said. “I came out here with a little table eight years ago and kept doing it.”
At one time, Capps was one of the rookies so he knows how steep the learning curve can be with furniture restoration. He does his best to help people who need a hand or some guidance during the process of stripping a project to bare wood, sanding or finishing it.
“If I can’t help you out, I’ll point you to someone that can,” he said. “Bring it out here and walk away with a nice piece of antique furniture.”
Most of those renting space at the workshop need little help though.
The ambitious
Near Capps, Grace Christianson pops up from behind her piano. She and her husband, Denis, have one of the most ambitious projects at the workshop. They are stripping and fixing a 100-year-old piano for their son.
Like most around them, the two are not new to the game of furniture refinishing. But even with experience the piano is a big project.
With each coat of stripper Grace applies and removes, the wood looks newer and younger. The 30 minutes she must let the chemical sit on the wood gives her time to talk to the people working adjacent to her booth.
One foot of the upright piano has a new veneer that Denis cut and fitted to match the oak of the rest of the instrument.
The Christiansons take pride in giving new life to well-built furniture.
“It is really fun taking something and bringing it back,” Grace said. “Things aren’t made with the expectation that you can use it all your life and pass it on anymore.”
She rubs a brown syrup of citrus stripper off a contour of the piano body and paints on another coat.
The next two weeks will be the same. A coat of stripper, wait. Elbow grease. Sanding. A coat of stain, wait.
A fresh look
The camaraderie of working near other people who love making old things new again keeps them coming back. People of all ages mill in and out of the building taking frequent breaks from their projects to gawk at the sometimes daunting projects their colleagues face.
Often pieces of furniture enter the building veiled in several coats of thick paint or dust or worse, in pieces.
They all leave with a fresh look and renewed value.
If you want to participate in 2011
Contact: Judy Mystrol (307) 684-5779
Cost of a space: $65
Cost of advice: Priceless
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