Trash or Treasure....

Today the Bag Lady wants to talk for a moment about garbage.

Those of you who live in the city probably don't give much thought to where your garbage ends up. You take your garbage to the curb and never give it another thought. Well, when you live in the country, there is no curb-side pick-up. You take your own garbage to the dump. Oh, excuse me, landfill. Actually, out here, it isn't even called a landfill anymore. The landfill site is full, so there are now two enormous dumpsters with a ramp in between them. You drive up the ramp and unload your garbage into the dumpsters. It's called a "transfer station" now. Common household garbage goes in the dumpsters, but anything else is supposed to be put in various other designated areas. There is a place for old cars, another place for old appliances, wood scraps, etc.

The Cowboy ordinarily takes on the chore of "going to the dump". The Bag Lady is not allowed to go to the dump. The Cowboy has put his foot down because she has a tendency to bring home "treasures" that other people have discarded. He was okay with this at first, because she brought home a really nice table the first time, which she stripped and repaired and painted. They use it all the time. But some of her treasures haven't been to his liking, and the day she brought home an antique couch that she had dreams of restoring to it's former glory, he made her turn around and take it right back! That's when he took over dump duty.

But the Cowboy has gone back to work this month, and the garbage was starting to pile up, so the Bag Lady was allowed to go to the dump! And the Cowboy forgot to tell her not to bring anything home! With trembling hands and quickened heart beat, she tossed the garbage into the dumpsters, then hastily made her way toward the other section to do her "shopping"! She drove slowly through the piles, scanning the contents. There were twisted pieces of metal that used to be a bed frame, an old lawnmower, a bicycle with no chain. In another section, there was a pile of interior doors that looked in very good shape. She pondered those for a few minutes - with the addition of folding legs, they would make a perfect table for cutting out fabric. But wait, what is that? Her eagle eye spied something lying on it's side, with the back toward her.

Quick as you can say 'scavenger', she was out of her truck and inspecting what at first she thought was a dresser, but quickly realized was a china cabinet. Someone had attempted to give it a facelift with a can of "suede" paint, (she knows this because they left the can in one of the drawers). They must not have liked the results, and decided to give up and get rid of it. Faint-hearted, that's what the Bag Lady calls it! She will admit though - it was butt-ugly!

She tried to judge the width of it to determine whether it would fit in her truck. Then she pondered the size of it and wondered if she could manage to get it in the truck by herself. A measure of her determination? A test of her courage? She huffed and she puffed and she strong-armed it into her truck. Oh, the guilty pleasure she felt! A shiver of anticipation went through her as she thought of all the stripping she could do!

She got it home and huffed and puffed and got it out of her truck, then huffed and puffed and dragged it up the steps onto the deck. Where she promptly collapsed in a heap. When the Cowboy arrived home from work, he eyed it suspiciously. The Bag Lady had the grace to blush, and stammered out that it was a china cabinet, and she had big plans to fix it and make it pretty. His only comment was "Well, it sure is ugly now!"

So, are you dying to know what it looked like? Are you?


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Here it is!

Told you it was butt-ugly!

The Bag Lady set to work. She got out her trusty Poly Super-Strippa and scraped all the ugly paint off. Then she sanded and sanded and sanded some more. She even resorted to using a dental pick to scrape the paint out of the little design carved into the wood.

It took her almost two days to get all the paint off. Whoever spray-painted it was very thorough, she'll say that for them! (They even painted the hinges.)

There is a little flip-up lid in the central part that hides a removable silverware tray.

The tray was lined with felt, which was filthy, so the Bag Lady took that apart and made a new bottom piece with new felt.

Before:

After:

The cabinet had also suffered some water damage, and some of the wood veneer had lifted, and the plywood backing and the bottom shelf had warped. So the Bag Lady replaced those pieces. The glass was missing from the doors, and all the knobs were gone.

She knows you are dying to see how it looks now, and she would love to show you. But she isn't quite done. She needs to take the doors in to town to have glass put in them. She could do it herself, but someone ran into her stash of glass (not someone who lives on the ranch) and broke it all.

So check back tomorrow if you'd like to see how the cabinet turned out!