diy: antique bench restoration

About 6 weeks ago, as JR and I were pulling out of our driveway to head to work, I noticed that the neighbors had dragged a ragged old bench to the street as trash. The wood was silvered and cracked; the front-most bench slat was broken in two and had been duct-taped together at least two years ago and had finally given way. At one time, the whole thing had been painted a cream color, wood and all, over all the nuts and bolts and everything.

We'd been watching a lot of HGTV and Antiques Roadshow, and I saw through all that to the bench it had been. I'd already busted my ankle at that time, so I asked JR to get it and put it in the garage. He thought it was a hunk of junk and didn't want it. He didn't even want to refinish it. We settled on him dragging it up into our driveway - he was hoping someone would come by during the day and haul it off to the dump, I think.

When we got home, it was still there, and he still thought it was a rusty, falling apart piece of crap, ugly as hell. And he didn't want another project. I told him that it would be MY project. I would do all the work. He wouldn't have to do a thing. He begrudgingly took it into the garage.



That weekend, Labor Day weekend, we went to Tahoe and then he had the week off as vacation time between leaving his old job and starting the new one. Apparently, with me bedridden, he'd taken a closer look at it, and not only did he no longer think it was a bad idea; he actually asked if it would be OK if he worked on it while I was at work.

I almost blew a gasket! NO!!! This is MY project! You didn't even want to drag the damn thing into our garage, and now you want to do it without me?!?! HELL NO! He said he could just go buy the wood and the stain and the paint and the stripper and the... Absolutely not! It was MY project, and I wanted to do all that stuff!

Since I could tell that he had finally seen the possibility in it, I decided we could refinish it together. So as soon as I could get around, we went and bought supplies. Originally, we were just going to buy some wood, stain it, and paint the cast iron frame a fabulous color, like red. After talking to some random lady in Home Depot who knew everything about wood, we decided to use redwood for the slats, Varathane them instead of staining them, and chose a charcoal silver hammered metal Rust-oleum for the frame.

Slowly but surely we've been hammering away at it on the weekends: cutting the redwood to the right size, sanding it all to rounded edges, drilling the holes for bolting the wood to the frame, stripping the paint off the iron. Stripping the paint was a killer. Going back through the layers, it had been painted cream, cream, brown, blue, hunter green, satin black, and primer red. And by primer red, I mean IMPOSSIBLE TO REMOVE red. We tried Stripper in a Can (America's #1 Stripper Brand!), industrial stripper (which burned JR badly), drills with paint-remover attachments, and we were still left with stubborn green, red and black paint in too many places. We finally had to resort to chipping the rest off with a chisel and an awl for the nooks and crannies.



Once we got the paint off, we could see the foundry name: BENICIA AGL WORKS, BENICIA, CALIF. JR looked it up on the internet, found out what the company is now, and sent a photo to see if they could give us any history; the foundry replied that the bench was manufactured some time between 1879 and 1905!!! That means even if it is the last thing they manufactured, the youngest it can be is 102. It is at least 102 years old, possibly 127 years old. Here's his post about it.

Last weekend we painted the iron frame pieces, and they came out perfect. We hung up all the slats and coated them with Varathane. The first coat took forever to dry, and by the time it was dry, the redwood had soaked it all up. We got to do the second coat yesterday, and it was dry to the perfect finish this morning. We decided another coat would make it too shiny.

This afternoon, we put everything together: nuts and bolts and slats and iron side pieces, and it looks AMAZING! What an accomplishment! It's so pretty it's in our living room now - great extra seating. :D

We're pretty dang happy with it.