Beginning woodworking for dummies
It all started with an overstuffed garage. After a mere couple of years in our new house, its one-car shelter, which started out in an orderly arrangement, had no room for a car. This was inconvenient, especially in the winter, when I had to scrape ice off my vehicle windows before leaving in the predawn hours to visit my gym before any semblance of sun crept up to help.
Help was summoned from the local Container Store, which sent a competent professional organizer over to see what could be done. She soon came up with a clever arrangement of shelves, hangers, and bins that would move belongings up and away from the space where a car could be.
During negotiations, she noticed an aging little wooden ladder that was in less than stellar condition. It had been transported here from Cleveland by my dad in the trunk of his Chevy Bel Air when I bought my first house, in Capitol View, in the early 1980s.
The ladder, along with an assortment of shovels, hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, rakes, a push lawnmower, and other household tools (most marked with a splotch of my mother’s red nail polish so I knew they were mine), belied my dad’s rather gruff earlier assertion that, at that point in my life, I had no business buying a house, let alone that I had any idea on how to take care of it. I guess he changed his mind.
Some of those tools are still with me. As for the ladder, “You ought to refinish this and use it as storage in the house,” the organizer suggested.
We ended up not contracting for the organizer’s services—her estimate for shelving exceeded our modest budget—but after cleaning out and discarding a great deal of junk (some of which we will surely need in the near future) to return the garage to close to mint condition, we took her advice about the old ladder.
But not without some trepidation. We once had an Unpainted Furniture Store in west Little Rock, where I bought much of the furniture for the Capitol View house. I learned how to sand, stain, and varnish tables, chairs, bookshelves, cabinets, and other objects made of high-quality oak, which would have been pricey for a young journalist, had I purchased them in room-ready condition.
Stains and varnishes were messy and sticky and awkward to use back then, although I eventually got the hang of the process. I grew to enjoy the work, which, like painting interior walls, can’t be hurried. And I was proud of the results, which remain in our house to this day.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to take on another such undertaking now. But all that rooting around while clearing out the garage produced sandpaper, foam paint applicators, plastic gloves (something good that came out of covid-19) nails and hammers to increase the ladder’s sturdiness, and rags to wipe up drips. All I needed was some stain.
I looked it up online and found it was much less fume-producing and easier to use than the products employed all those years ago. So I ordered a quart from Amazon.com at a reasonable price, moved the ladder onto our porch, and spent a few hours on the least frigid winter days of January sanding off its paint stains and splinters, while figuring out the best way to make it stand up straight.
Then, when at last a pleasantly breezy and temperate afternoon arrived (the stain has to be applied at temperatures between 60-90 degrees), I set the little ladder on what’s left of the grass in our fenced 200-square-foot dog run (Savannah and Rikki run madly in circles there— destroying the grass in the process— when a dog, bicyclist, walker, runner, or other moving object dares to pass by) and got to work.
Staining took about an hour. It soon dried to a tacky finish, then remained outside overnight. Now it’s upstairs, in the room we call a library. It serves a practical purpose—we have high ceilings and bookshelves not even my six-foot-two husband can reach without standing on a chair—but mostly it just looks great, better than I ever imagined it would.
No injuries were suffered other than some gray blobs of stain on my hands (those covid gloves aren’t too sturdy) that will wear off in time.
I could take the extra step of varnishing or sealing the freshly refurbished ladder’s finish to protect the stain. But I like the idea of an occasional scratch revealing its woodtoned underpinnings alongside the cloudy gray.
My dad died on March 29, 2010, and the restoration of the ladder began on March 30 of this year—an inadequate but earnest salute to his efforts to make me a responsible homeowner, like he was.
An apartment-dwelling friend is intrigued by my project; she is now encouraged to take on one of her own. I’m not experienced enough to bring about a woodworking refurbishing revolution, but maybe I’ll start a trend.