Too Many Options

Having options in life can be great. Want to buy a house within a certain price range? Here's 20 that meet your criteria!

Awesome.

Want to get a puppy? Here are 15 dogs that need a forever home. Pick the one that will fit your family!

Totes adorbs.

Need to paint a wall? Here's 500 shades of gray!

Um....

Getting married? Here's 300 ideas for wedding invitations!

Help me...

Like I said, options can be great but they can also be extremely overwhelming. Such was the case with the dusty glider. The last time I posted about it was at the beginning of March because I honestly had no idea what I wanted to do with it.

At first, I had a vision to leave it unpainted, restore the wood, and simply make a cushion for it. I really wanted to try to give it a makeover that matched the style of the chair. That idea morphed into restoring the wood, cutting out a new seat bottom, and upholstering it. That morphed into painting the entire piece. But what color? What fabric do I have to coordinate with it?

Ugh.

That's pretty much where I'm at in life at the moment. I'm turning 32 this summer and I want to be more intentional about doing what I love. I've been given skills, abilities, gifts, and talents and I want to eliminate the things in my life that don't fall into those categories. I want to do what I love every day and live my life passionately pursuing what I was created for. Time is short. Let's do this.

So...where do you start?

When I feel overwhelmed, I start with what I know I can do. With the chair, I started by taking it apart.

Using a flathead screwdriver, I pried the old seat off. You can see how warped and worn it was.

Once that was off, I used my hammer and pried off the original nails.

Next, I set to work separating the chair body from the gliding mechanism. The original screws and bolts were pretty rusty, so I soaked them in apple cider vinegar for a few hours to loosen and dissolve the rust.

I still can't get over the date stamp on the iron "elbows".

I did some research on these. The patent date for the gliding mechanism is May 1888...not 1988. That doesn't mean the chair itself is that old, but I do think it's interesting that there isn't one phillips head screw on the entire piece. That could date it before the 1930's when Henry F. Phillips invented the phillips head screw to provide more torque. (Or it could mean that the chair manufacturer just didn't use any philips head screws.)

The metal bits were also rusty and dull, so I painted them with Rust-Oleum's Painter's Touch in glossy black.

I lined them all up like little ducks in a row and gave them two coats of Rust'Oleum.

For the chair body, I still wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, so I began by doing what I could - sanding off the original polyurethane finish, which was chipping and crackled. (Let me tell you, sanding spindles is NOT an easy task.) After about 2 hours, I realized that my vision of sanding the piece down and restoring the wood was going to take forever. So, I took stock of my paint inventory and the fabric that I had available and I decided to go bold bold and paint the chair body in Miss Mustard Seed's "Kitchen Scale". It's a punchy teal color that is friendly and bright. It deepens beautifully when you apply hemp oil to it.