Happy Birthday, Mrs. King

[If you just stumbled in, or have very poor short term memory, I am recounting the story of a free clothes dresser we rescued from the curb during our town’s Festival of Trash]

My wife’s abandoned dresser didn’t stay on the lawn very long. An old feller pulled up in a pickup truck while the boys from across the street were still carrying bits of it out of the house. He tried to mangle it into his truck by himself. He thought he was in luck when the kids helped him load it, but of course he had no idea that the dresser was made in Beelzebub’s Country Classics Furniture Factory. My wife, bless her soul, tried to warn him that all that glitters isn’t glitter, but he wasn’t interested. He was a man newly smitten who wasn’t appropriately curious about exactly how the new object of his affections became someone else’s furniture version of an ex-wife. Good luck, my unwary friend.

A sense of urgency had now crept into the proceedings. My wife’s clothing collection is somewhat meager, but it looked much more extensive now that it was on the loose in our bedroom. Steps must be taken. Her new bureau must be pressed into service sooner than later.

The boys had deposited the old ark in my basement workshop. It was already after lunch. I began to take a real interest in the thing, mostly because I had to. It couldn’t be one of those projects that lingers languidly over the years, waiting for a supply of free time to make its appearance. I once had free time, back when Johnson was president, if memory serves. You’ll be glad to learn it wasn’t Andrew Johnson.

I needed to understand this wooden beast properly, or I feared I’d end up like the guy who was currently listening to the shrieking drawers in my wife’s old dresser. I looked for clues. The drawers were lined with newspaper from 1960, which were a hoot to read. That sort of clue works on TV, but in the real world it just means the dresser was at least that old.

The style looked postwar to my eye. It was sort of colonial without being slavish. The grain was mostly obscured by the muddy brown finish, but it looked like maple, which has bland grain. It was stupid heavy, though, so I knew it was birch. Birch was cheaper than maple back then, and got used in normal people’s furniture a lot. The dresser was made in a factory, but not a modern sort of factory. More like a workshop with a bunch of people in it. It still looked like humans had made it.

The drawers were dovetailed front and back. That’s pretty old school. I decided to stop using my spider sense to determine the age of the thing, and looked in the drawers instead. I found the spot where my neighbor’s big brother had written his name and the number 1943 in it. It might not have been brand new in 1943, of course, but hey, close enough.

The finish had been subject to extremes of sunlight and temperature and humidity. Not left outdoors, but I figured an attic or something. My neighbor later told me that it was left on an enclosed porch for many years. Bingo. The finish was missing here and there, but what there was looked like suede when you ran your finger across it. It was completely crisscrossed with fingermarks going every which way. I pawed at it a bit, running through the rusty filing cabinet of my mind to figure out what I was looking at. It came to me in a vision — all at once.

I knew it was shellac. Of all the dumb luck. No one had “fixed” this piece of furniture in 75 years. It didn’t have any new, improved finish that wouldn’t last but couldn’t be fixed. It wasn’t “eco,” another word for wasteful useless disposable plastic crap. The finish was made from the nasty ooze that comes out of a lac bug and dries on a tree branch. Your favorite Hindoo used to gather the stuff by putting tarps on the ground under trees where the lac bugs congregate, and then beating the limbs with sticks to make the amber flakes rain down. When you mix lac leavings with alcohol, you get shellac. It’s wonderful stuff.

Shellac sticks to anything. Anything sticks to shellac. Shellac can be diluted till there’s barely a whisper of lac left in it, but it still makes a coherent film. It seals knots. Shellac can be polished to mirror shine if you want to. A technique called French polishing is the finish you saw on Baron Percy Devonshire Smythe XXIVth’s harewood and mahogany gaming table back when King George was still gibbering on his throne. You can make shellac look like anything you want. Our dresser had pigment mixed in with it to make a kind of varnish stain that could be sprayed on in one coat as an all-purpose stain/finish.

Shellac is so safe for humans to handle that you can eat it, and you might have. They used to make the capsules that drugs and vitamins come in out of shellac. And the greatest thing about shellac, at least for me, is that no matter how old it is, it immediately dissolves and gets loose in the presence of alcohol, just like everyone at your office Christmas party.

My wife and I play a game. We talk about what we might accomplish if we had twenty-five bucks. I always come up with things like fixing one of many leaks in the roof with one bundle of shingles, while her mind wanders to a new shower curtain and rod, or something of the sort. We put our ideas into practice whenever fortune favors us with a quarter of a C note. It’s amazing how much pleasure you can bring into your life with a little sum if you set your mind to it. I set my mind to it.

I brought my 13-year old to the hardware store with me. That makes it a pleasure excursion instead of a chore. He made me stop on the way home at the waterfall, where we sat on the battered bole of a 75-foot tree that had drifted down the river and washed up on the granite ledge. We watched the water roar for a happy moment, and it didn’t even eat into our twenty-five bucks. Here’s what we bought:

That’s about all we would need. I could scrounge whatever else was necessary from around the house. I let my boy remove all the knobs, so that he could be part of his mother’s gift. Then we got to work. I poured alcohol into the spray bottle, misted the top of the piece of furniture, and then misted it again until it stayed wet-looking. Then I unwrapped a piece of steel wool, re-wrapped it into a flat pad, and went back and forth on the surface. The shellac quickly became a kind of porridge, which I wiped off with the paper towels. In a few minutes, the top was clean.

There was a lot of elbow grease involved, but it was easy work because it was effective, and showed continual progress, which is important to avoid discouragement. I went over every surface, laying the furniture down flat whenever I could to make a very shallow swimming pool for the alcohol instead of a waterfall. Keeping it wet is important, because alcohol evaporates very quickly, and when it does, you’re back to the beginning. After an hour or two, here’s what it looked like:

It looked kind of blah, of course, but it was clean. If you refer back to my comment about shellac retaining its ability to cohere no matter how much you thin it out, you’ll understand that even though the dresser looks stripped, it’s really just very thinly shellacked. It’s sealed enough for a coat of finish, if that’s the way you wanted to go. I could stain (dye) it if I wanted, but that would add days of work I didn’t have. I put my thinking cap on.

Now is the part of the proceeding where the expert on TV mumbles, “And then a miracle occurs,” and then shows you the finished product in the next scene. Well, I might own next to nothing, but everything I do own is useful. I went rooting around on the shelves, and found this:

I bought this tub of Briwax in 1986. I was working for a rich A-hole on Cape Cod at the time. His carpenters had installed the kind of elaborate built-in closet interiors that are common today but mostly unknown then. They were fabricated in place from birch plywood and solid maple trim, and then finished with varnish. They were as rough as sandpaper, and he wasn’t happy. Like an idiot, they asked me how to fix it, and I told them to sand with emery cloth and then wax with fine steel wool applicators. Lucky me, they let me put the rich guy’s money where my mouth was, and I spent half the summer rubbing the insides of closets. I still had a half empty container of the pigmented wax I used. Golden Oak, if you’re interested.

The stuff never goes bad. I rubbed it all over using fine steel wool, and then buffed it with an old t-shirt. There was prodigious elbow grease involved, but the work wasn’t really difficult. This is what it turned out like:

I replaced a couple of drawer stops that were rattling around under the drawers, banged in a couple of nails that had worked loose, waxed the drawer runners with regular wax, and washed the inside of the drawers with Windex. I started the project after lunch, and was done at dinnertime.

The thing smelled great, in addition to looking right smart. Shellac and wax is one of the oldest finishing methods for furniture there is, and one of the best. The next day, my older son and I carried the dresser upstairs in time for the birthday party, and we had a feast and a cake.

Happy Birthday, Mrs. King.

Grass Is Good as Carpet, Anyplace Is Fine

When I mentioned that the Festival of Trash saved my bacon, I wasn’t kidding. It’s my wife’s birthday, and I gots no moneys. I don’t even have a money. What was I going to do?

People used to say, “The Lord will provide,” and mean it. That led morons with opinions to deduce that the Christian religions consist of pulling a lever and out pops the candy. If no candy showed up, you’d lose your faith, or Richard Dawkins would call you a rube. Simple faith doesn’t work like that.

“The Lord will provide” really means that you’re supposed to do everything in your power to help yourself, first and foremost, and then trust that the universe isn’t entirely malignant, and maybe you’ll catch a break. Assume the world is not entirely carpeted in banana peels. Don’t expect every apple to have a fishing supply store in it. Don’t mistake every pineapple for a hand grenade.

The operative part of this faith that the world isn’t out to get you in particular, just in general, brings a duty, not a benefit. Saying, “The Lord will provide,” means you have to be on the lookout for good fortune that might come your way. You have to recognize it as an opportunity. It might come in disguise. It might come dressed up as a battered dresser:

This is what the festival of trash offered up as my salvation. It might look light an old dresser to you, but it looked like redemption to me. One of my nearby neighbors, who is a hell of a guy, put this dresser out on the curb for the Festival of Trash. He also put out some easy chairs with a substantial mixture of duct tape in their DNA, a semi-lethal crib, some skis you could stand still on, and assorted other items jetsamic. My wife and I were standing in front of our house, unloading shipping pallets from my truck to leave as my offering for the Festival of Trash. My wife’s nose went into the air like a wild animal on a scent. “Hey, lookit that.”

She made a beeline across the street. She’s wanted a dresser. She’s wanted a dresser, bad. She’s wanted a dresser, real bad. She’s wanted a dresser, real bad, since her husband bought her a real bad dresser about a dozen years ago.

My wife had always done without stuff. Our life was always spent crawling upward and onward out of the primordial poverty ooze, and generally being pushed back in by people that can’t be bothered to worry about every undercapitalized business in the country. We never really had any disposable income we could trust. I was self-employed, and worked day and night, but there was never any surety in it. We never bought much of anything, it seemed.

Then I got a job, a real job. It lasted four years. I went from the lowest man on a very big totem pole to a division manager in three years. Just like now, my income started with a 1, but it had an additional zero for a change. It was time, finally, to buy my wife something.

I bought her a dresser. It was a very expensive dresser, at least by my standards. I went to what I considered a fancy-pants furniture store, Ethan Allen, and bought a cherry Shaker dresser for my wife’s birthday present. It was fool’s gold furniture.

That dresser was never right. I paid for delivery. They scratched it, which I wouldn’t have done if I did it myself. I always seem to be paying people to do what I wouldn’t do, but not in a good way. This is the basis of government and furniture delivery. We were faced with sending it back and waiting for them to bring a new one to scratch again, or putting up with it. Oh, it’s not so bad, we lied to ourselves.

I looked at it every day when I woke up, of course. I didn’t make furniture then, but I knew what a Shaker chest of drawers should look like. I began to notice this one was stretched a bit. Too low, too long to be considered in proportion. It had the kind of drawer glides that you see in kitchen cabinets. They began to malfunction. The drawers got harder and harder to slide in and out. Unlike all our hand me down furniture, there was no way to wax the runners or anything. They were no-maintenance. That means “disposable” if you’re telling the truth.

The dresser was heavy without being strong. It was made from particle board covered with a thin cherry veneer. The finish was sprayed on to make the exact same boring reddish tone all over. The grain was obscured. It wasn’t pretty at all if it got a mark on it, and couldn’t be effectively fixed. And it came with a mark, remember?

The top was very strong, but not stiff like solid wood would have been. The design was too long for the four legs, so it began to sag in the middle. I’d been to architectural school for ten minutes, so I knew all about “creep.” The top became swaybacked, and the drawers began to have a lot of trouble going in and out.

My wife wrestled with that stupid, expensive dresser for a decade and more. It was her nemesis. She never complained to me about it, but I would hear the shriek of the drawers as she shoved them home, and the little grumble that followed. She would never say it, but I knew that I had gotten one chance to delight her, and I had fumbled it.

So here it was. The Lord, or my neighbor who had too much furniture, would provide. It’s a testimony to my wife’s good nature that she would have put that battered dresser in our bedroom, just as you see it, and used it. She just wanted to keep her clothes in something that didn’t shriek at her.

My good fortune continued. My neighbor is minding two high school exchange students. One is from Denmark, and one is from Germany. You can tell they are foreigners because they are polite and speak perfect English. My neighbor directed the kids to carry  the dresser over to our house. This was beginning to look like luxury to my eye. I was standing there on my neighbor’s lawn, socializing, when those two foreigners appeared from my front door, following my wife. They were carrying that shaky Shaker dresser, and they plunked it on my lawn.

My wife knew that sometimes the Lord provides a pretext, and that’s as good as a reason.

[read the conclusion of the story of treasure among the trash here]