My Bench

A few weeks ago I mentioned to hubby I wanted a bench for our newly finished mudroom, I had all these great locker style benches in mind, with wainscoting or bead board. Storage was a must/ Kind of like this:

Or even like this:

Especially like this:

Unfortunately due to the layout of the room and the electrical panel that was in my way I couldn’t quite have what I wanted. So I began my search for an appropriate bench. Unfortunately finding something big enough and well constructed… forget it. Imagine my surprise when this little bench found it’s way into the back of hubby’s truck:

He found it just sitting, collecting dust in his father’s basement. It was a little sad, someone had painted it with about 4 layers of house paint over the years. Hard, probably lead based house paint. The story is that the bench is at least 100 years old, it’s former home a church that was on family land. Painstakingly I stripped it, it took 3 bottles of stripper, a lot of scraping and A LOT of sanding! I got MOST of the paint off. I had originally intended to paint it black but after all that work it seemed like a shame to cover it with black paint!

I say painstakingly because I splashed stripper in my eye, at least three times got it on my skin and my poor Birkenstocks became the innocent victims to the gunky, sticky paint residue. 

The mudroom projects are not completely finished, the door still needs to be painted black and hooks need hung and the closet on the other side of the room needs work but it’s a start!

Jacquelyn