The first (only?) piece of antique furniture I ever bought, and probably the only piece that is actually worth anything, I more or less bought by accident the year I moved to Austin. This was well before Fail It Yourself, and in fact well before I’d ever even used a staple gun. Basically, I have no idea who the woman was who bought this piece of furniture. She may have even believed she liked knitting. She was a very strange creature. Nevertheless, this woman was me, since I still own this item.
I was looking around Craigslist for a used mattress (grad students can’t be choosy, don’t judge) and found one for $200 that happened to come with an antique metal bed frame. That seemed pretty lucky, so I bought it. I slept on bed and mattress for two years, then needed to dispatch both so I could move to Los Angeles with my entire life packed into the trunk of a Korean subcompact.
But my mother wisely stopped me from selling the bed frame, saying she’d keep it in San Antonio. She thought I might one day want to refinish it. In January this year, I looked over my photographs from the past few years. It seemed clear that, since all my photographs were of the dog or literal, actual peeling paint, I should either get some new hobbies or think about refinishing the bed. I asked my parents how I might go about shipping that bed to myself with as little inconvenience or expense to them as possible and started researching costs and means. I asked for the bed’s measurements, and this is what I got in reply.
Mom’s text caption: “El iron bed”
My parents, paragons of inexhaustible generosity and energy, were ready for a road trip. Two weeks later, my bedframe was deposited into my apartment. My dad, after seeing how much paint was in the back of his car, exclaimed that just a little stripper would clean that baby right up.
Peeling
What’s under all that gunk, I wonder?
I must have had some premonition that this was going to be tougher than he thought, because I didn’t touch the thing for almost two months. But in late March, I determined that the time was right. I had a whole weekend clear to work on it, and figured that I’d get it stripped on Saturday, then painted on Sunday.
While I have no idea what I’m doing most of the time, you would think that I’d have peeled and applied enough paint by now to know that failing it myself rarely goes according to plan. Nevertheless, I was shocked, shocked that this project took five weekends to complete.
And here’s the tale of fail.
First, the prep work. After pinning lots of photos of other peoples’ stuff that I want my stuff to look like, I determine that I want to go with a dark color when I paint this thing. I’m thinking maybe very dark gray, or very dark brown, and I think maybe I want to do some chalk paint and wax action. So I head to Agoura Hills to look at the chalk paint. I decide that the gray is too light and bluish, even with the dark wax, and I don’t like the brown at all. And anyway, all the googling I’m doing about painting metal says to go with spray paint.
So I gather my materials at Home Depot and pick up a couple cans of metallic spray paint that I intend to test out. Then I head home and get to work.
First, I use the stripper I already have. If paint stripper could be organic, this stuff would be organic. It’s orange, low-odor, non-caustic, indoor-safe, and absolutely hopeless on whatever kryptonite-based paint is on this bed frame. I spend a day scraping away with this stuff, and my hand aches and my shoulder throbs, and I’ve taken off maybe six square inches of ancient, fossilized, sedimentary paint.
I go back to Home Depot and get the poisonous, noxious, chemical-based, burn-your-face-off paint stripper and try that. It’s a bit better, but whatever time I gain in paint-peeling efficiency I lose to skin-peeling prevention every time I run to the garden hose to rinse away the tiny drop that’s melting off my flesh. And yes, I’m wearing chemical-proof rubber gloves.
The biggest mystery about this whole thing is trying to understand why I should have to peel off someone else’s hideous mistakes. The layers of paint on this frame numbered no less than five (in some parts more) and included white, pink, metallic silver, metallic gold (on the decorative details), dark green, and aqua blue, in that order (top layer to bottom one). And where are the bozos who chose these colors now? And why isn’t this their problem?
Over and over I asked myself why none of this bed’s previous owners bothered to strip it before painting it. Finally, I scraped my way down to the answer: Scraping paint is a miserable chore that no one anywhere ever wants to do.
I mean, who paints a bed frame this color?
So why do I do it? I guess because I’ve thought about making this bed look as nice as it should for nearly a decade and can’t bear to let that dream die. And, I suppose, because I know I won’t be happy unless I do this one project right.
Also, I want to know what those decorative bits look like without the paint, and I am rewarded for my work when I discover that they are brass and pretty much as awesome as I could have imagined.
So, after four weekends of scraping and a couple of chemical burns, I get all the paint off this thing while listening to Nick Offerman’s Paddle Your Own Canoe, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd, and Zac Bissonette’s The Great Beanie Baby Bubble. (Not all of them in their entirety, silly; I did other things during these weeks that included book-listening. This project felt fifty hours long, but it wasn’t) I also think there was some of Stephen King’s Dark Tower series in there somewhere, but I can’t be sure. It’s all kind of a fume-induced blur.
The bare bedframe.
I was thrilled when it was done—but then I realized that the hard part was still to come. I had decisions to make, and nothing increases my ability to fail it myself quite like a decision.
Fail It Yourself 