Trash to treasure - Picking and sanding

I enjoy working with wood, restoring something made from wood is even better.

Now when you find something someone else was throwing out and restore that, that's great. Having my son's helping out and getting their hands dirty bringing wood back to life is just the best!

We live in an apartment, so when I take them to go and ride their bicycles, we usually go to a place nearby, where the road is closed off and there are a few nice tall trees as well. Close by there are these large recycling bins where people can put paper, plastic and organic waste separately.

Sometimes they put old furniture and who knows what else there too, one day this wooden stool caught my eye, on the way back home I took a detour to see if it was salvageable.

When I picked it up and felt the weight I thought I must have a go at fixing this! It is quite a bit heavier than the stools we have at home and has no chipboard in sight.

At this point my eldest and I had done a bit to remove some of the old and peeling varnish. We tried initially using a paint scraper, but after my son worked a few grooves into the top, we switched to sandpaper instead.

As he got to work sanding the top of the stool, I removed the bent and rusty screws and tackled the bottom part.

The sandpaper made quick work of the varnish on the larger flat parts, here you can see the varnish had peeled off quite badly.

Now we jump ahead to a few weeks later, I had gotten a sinus infection and bronchitis, so was forced to leave this alone for quite a while.

This past Saturday we tackled it again though, this time both the boys and myself sanding away, making some good progress.

We had bought face masks to keep the dust out of our lungs, but they were incredibly small and a constant source of irritation.

Nevertheless we pressed on and made good progress until the sun baking down and the wind blowing the dust in our eyes got a bit too much.

We still have the fiddly bits to go, in all the nooks and cranny's, but on the whole this is looking way better.

Especially the top! It must have been outside in the rain for some time because the wood had warped slightly and gone very dark, with the top layer quite soft. This clogged up the sandpaper in no time, but my eldest kept at it and did a stellar job in getting rid of the grimy coat.

I am well impressed with how it turned out. It may never look like new, but it will be a thousand times better than when I picked it up from the trash!

We bought better face masks as well as some goggles, so next time we will be more prepared :)

Hopefully we can get to this again two weekends from now and get the rest of the sanding done, then time to put some new varnish on!