A friend was remodeling an old house, one I have admired for many years. The porch had pillars, and it would have been a terrible waste to put those 100-year-old handmade wooden objects in a dumpster. So, I remembered a friend’s son who likes architectural pieces for his antique store, and then asked my remodeling friend if I could have the pillars to pass along. He agreed.
We loaded them into the pickup, took them home, and learned that the antique guy didn’t want them.
Oh-oh. A pickup full of pillars, needing to be stored? Nope.
I made a list of things that they could be used for. Then I gave half of the pillars to my very creative neighbor.
The first item on my list needed to be done before Christmas.
I used a few miles of painter’s blue tape, wrapping in a diagonal pattern. Next I covered the pillars with 2 coats of white paint. When I peeled the tape off, it was a little tricky to see where to put the red paint, because the new white paint wasn’t that different from the old white paint.
Remembering that no one was paying me and no one really cared, I painted the red stripes without taping. There was a great deal of covering red wobbly and hairy lines with white paint, and then recovering white wobbly and hairy lines with red.
Because the pillars are actually tapered, a couple of times they fell over while sitting outside to dry.
Finally, we carried one to the abandoned fire hydrant at the bottom of the driveway and dropped it over the pipe. (Trail Guy sawed off the pieces that were in the way so it would fit.) I’ve been wondering for years what to do with that old thing. You can see that the stripes are a bit wobbly and unevenly spaced; this is the result of pantsing the project.
I carried the second one to another neighbor’s house and dropped it over an abandoned address post that lost its numbers several years ago. (We seem to have abandonment issues in our neighborhood.)
4 Comments
I’m curious—what did the 100-year-old handmade wooden pillars look like before they were made over?
Marjie, they were white, sat atop a wall surrounding a porch and had windows between them.
What a nice and creative way to repurpose unwanted stuff! Will you leave them out all year, or put them up again this November?
Sharon, the candy cane one is now in the workshop with a good sized split in it from all the rain. When it dries out, I will probably paint a cap for it, and then next year it will have a top so the rain won’t soak into the wood so much.
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