|
Sorry to leave you guys hanging. I had to leave right after the OP last night to deal with The Green Calamity.
So. One long hot shower, two ice-cold lemon flavored girl beers (for which I make no apology) and several coats of "Basic Black" later....
What happened is that I found a sweet but forlorn little antique table a few weeks ago at a second-hand store. It had suffered from years of neglect and looked just awful with multiple coats of old paint peeling off and a thick coat of grime and dust all over it, cobwebs in the undercorners, etc. It was unsightly to the point that they wanted only a few dollars for it.
But I picked it up and turned it around, and found a gem underneath: it was a sturdy little table for its age and built with great care; nice solid wood, well-fitted joints and seams, elegant legs and but one small nick overall. It still had the manufacturer’s label, now faded to obscurity but nonetheless a mark of pride in craftsmanship, glued to the bottom. In fact I had been looking for a small table, with an open shelf, just exactly that size for a corner in my bathroom to create some better space and traffic flow. So I took my little treasure home and set about refinishing it in the garage.
At first I thought I would just scrub the grime off and remove the loose paint, then sand down the rough spots and keep it "as is" for an authentic "shabby chic" look. Which I've done with old furniture in the past and had it turn out very nicely. So I put some time into carefully removing the old paint, revealing a lovely mahogany finish underneath. But I got about halfway through that process before abandoning it upon realizing that the paint was coming off too unevenly for it to look right in the end. So I decided to strip the whole thing down. Using the gloppy, safety-tinted Day-Glo Orange citrus scented environmentally safe stripper, of course. Read: takes twice as long and costs twice as much but eliminates guilt along with old paint.
Stripping (furniture) by hand is a long, messy, smelly job on a good day, but I was determined to do the little table justice and I did take my time and do a very thorough job with both the chemical stripping and the subsequent sanding. And likely inhaled more toxic fumes than I should have. Which probably explains a lot.
Anyway, by the time I was almost finished it was looking pretty good and bringing up some really nice old pine, so I thought maybe I would just keep the bare wood, adding only a sealer. Well of course the place I stripped last, the top of the table (dumb girl, always strip the area with the most use first!), had old water stains that I just couldn't strip out. So then I decided that instead of keeping the bare wood look I was going to stain the table back to the original color and leave it at that.
I shopped around to find just the right color stain. It's the artist in me, I'm picky about that kind of stuff. Probably too picky. At last I settled on “Bombay Mahogany,” a dark and sultry mahogany, dramatic and elegant. Perfect.
Although I rubbed my Bombay Mahogany into the wood with great tenderness, using three coats in an attempt to get the color even… it just didn't go on as well as I would have liked. Undoubtedly this was the result of operator error more than anything. Or maybe not so much “error” as “impatience.” But the wind blowing those random teeny tiny little cornflake-ish birch tree things into the still-wet finish was not helpful. Okay frankly it was over-the-top maddening and I lost it. A little bit.
Finally I thought screw it, I'll just paint over the mahogany with an off-white crackle paint finish, allowing the mahogany to peek through which will still look nice and at least not make the many hours I spent tediously staining the wood a complete waste of time. Basically this would give it an "updated shabby chic" look and pretty much accomplish the same result I originally had in mind. I was content to still have my Bombay Mahogany as the background color.
Mind, I have done the crackle paint finish on a furniture restoration project some years previously and was happy with the result. So I went out and bought the crackle paint kit. The kit comes with a base coat formulated to allow the top coat to separate in the “crackle” pattern, and the crackled effect top coat, both of which are sprayed on. Though I swear in the old days it was painted on. Or maybe I used another brand. But I digress.
So I got my work area set up for spray painting and started in with the base coat. But a frightening thing happened when I first pressed on the nozzle, as the can began spraying my little mahogany table green. Park Bench Green, to be exact.
I stopped spraying and stood there in shock; it was as though I had the aerosol can version of Linda Blair in my hand. Could this really be happening? So I sprayed a bit on nearby newsprint to make sure my eyes were not deceiving me. They weren’t. It was green green green.
Well naturally I was mortified, but I kept my cool thinking that certainly there must be a perfectly logical explanation for this freakish development. So then I naively, optimistically and foolishly concluded that what with all the safety precautions and everything these days, in all probability a green tint was added to the clear base coat so one might see where one was spraying and avoid inadvertently spraying innocent bystanding objects, or inhaling too many paint fumes in a poorly ventilated area. And surely this Green Safety Tint would dry clearly and invisibly. Yes, I actually thought that. So with newfound courage I continued spray-painting my sweet little mahogany table… Park Bench Green. And waited for it to clear as it dried. And waited. And waited.
About half an hour later it occurred to me that either my color vision had spontaneously performed a 180-degree inversion solely with respect to the red and green aspects of its various rods and cones, or the little mahogany table was still… Park Bench Green. Quickly observing that other objects which I knew to be red and green - such as grass and stop signs - were still their empirically assigned colors, I concluded that the little table was terminally green. After entertaining some measure of chagrin I decided to search for answers amid the madness. Right after a long hot shower and an ice-cold beer.
Having cleaned up and calmed down, I began with the approach that has served me best throughout the years: Presume I did something outrageously dumb, then retrace my steps through the entire debacle from the very start looking for my error.
I started by looking over the box in which the paint kit arrived to find any mention of the fact that the base coat was Park Bench Green, or anything approaching it. There was absolutely no mention anywhere of the fact that the base coat was green on the box proper, which for the record is the same box used for all of the similar products in this company’s line. In fact, the only apparent way to tell which of several products one is buying is to look at the cap of the spray can of the top coat, which is exposed as part of the packaging.
The word “green,” however, did appear once in tiny letters on a small, 1x1.25” white sticker on the bottom of the box, to wit: “cream on green.”
Well I knew that “cream” was the color of the paint I bought which I expected to crackle, and that was the “actual color” as demonstrated on the exposed spray can cap. But what was “green”? Okay obviously it was the base coat, but how was I supposed to know that? Nowhere did it say it was the base coat. For all I knew and from what I understood, “green” referred to the color of the plastic spray can cap; I presumed the “green” was there as a demo color, as it were, because there had to be some darkish color on the paint cap to show off the effect of the crackling “cream” colored paint on top. And I figured they told you that green was the color of the cap for… I don’t know, color-matching liability purposes or something.
Was the package somehow mismarked? Because I mean really, otherwise the paint company would literally be presuming that everybody in the world desires Park Bench Green as the background color for every crackle paint project. Seriously, what was the alternative? That I alone am the only rogue Anti-Green Do It Herselfer on the planet? That seemed a little far-fetched. Even for me.
In search of enlightenment I returned to the hardware store where I purchased the offending paint. Having arrived at said store and inspecting the other kits of crackle paint, I learned the horrible truth: Yes, apparently everyone else in the world besides me is smart enough to figure out that the single word “green” does indeed indicate the color of the base coat and not just the color of the plastic cap.
I also learned that I did in fact have a choice between base coats: either Park Bench Green or basic black. I learned this, of course, by finding the word “black” in tiny type on several of the 1x1.25” stickers located on the bottom of all the boxes which are otherwise identical and in fact mixed together on the shelf.
Given this new plethora of options and much preferring black to my other two options, Park Bench Green or Re-Stripping and Starting All Over, I chose a new crackle kit with a black base coat. But not before carefully cross-checking the word “black” to the actual color of both the exposed can’s cap and the hidden can’s cap. One can never be too cautious in such matters.
Last night against all odds Basic Black performed flawlessly in a highly (around this house, anyway) publicized trial run under tightly controlled conditions on newsprint, and after repeating that performance in a closely monitored first coat of actual application, was conditionally approved for the two remaining coats. Post-event evaluation this morning confirmed that Black is, indeed, Black.
In a moment I am going to begin spray painting the top coat, which is allegedly a “cream” color. Rest assured that I have taken all necessary precautions: The water is hot, the beer is cold, 911 is good to go on speed-dial and as an added precaution I have several squares of very fine Swiss chocolate in a readily accessible location.
Alright. I’m going in.
Wish me luck.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
