What a pleasure it is to is clean up old furniture; seeing original finishes emerging through dust and grime.
The cupboard my father made decades ago was too large for our current house, so it has been in storage along with several other items.
I dragged it out into the sunshine, with difficulty. It's all solid timber, tongue-and-groove, dowelled and glued joints - no staple gun for Dad. It is more of a sideboard, I suppose, seven feet long, eighteen inches deep and four feet tall.
Adding to the weight, of course, is the mosaiced top T. added several years ago using broken up excess tiles from her ceramics work. It's magnificent, a kind of spreading rays of the sun effect with mainly yellow, blue and white tiles from her 'lemon tree' period.
(Broken tile warning: when the mosaic project was almost finished, broken tiles glued down, but edging and sealing not completed, I carelessly ran the back of my hand along the top edge of the cupboard. A fragment of tile at the edge, broken on the angle, projected an almost invisible shard of its clear top glaze, sharper than a knife, across which the main knuckle of my middle finger passed. There was almost no pain. The tendon was sliced through as cleanly as with a surgeon's knife.)
*
There is just the spot for this cupboard at the new house, under a west-facing window. It will look nice and remind me of Dad. Plus you can fit a lot of stuff into a seven-foot-long, mosaiced-top cupboard!
The cupboard my father made decades ago was too large for our current house, so it has been in storage along with several other items.
I dragged it out into the sunshine, with difficulty. It's all solid timber, tongue-and-groove, dowelled and glued joints - no staple gun for Dad. It is more of a sideboard, I suppose, seven feet long, eighteen inches deep and four feet tall.
Adding to the weight, of course, is the mosaiced top T. added several years ago using broken up excess tiles from her ceramics work. It's magnificent, a kind of spreading rays of the sun effect with mainly yellow, blue and white tiles from her 'lemon tree' period.
(Broken tile warning: when the mosaic project was almost finished, broken tiles glued down, but edging and sealing not completed, I carelessly ran the back of my hand along the top edge of the cupboard. A fragment of tile at the edge, broken on the angle, projected an almost invisible shard of its clear top glaze, sharper than a knife, across which the main knuckle of my middle finger passed. There was almost no pain. The tendon was sliced through as cleanly as with a surgeon's knife.)
*
There is just the spot for this cupboard at the new house, under a west-facing window. It will look nice and remind me of Dad. Plus you can fit a lot of stuff into a seven-foot-long, mosaiced-top cupboard!
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