Finishing Room

As our furniture business grew it no longer seemed to work very well to quit working in the shop when ever there was a batch of chairs and tables drying after a coat of varnish. After a lot of discussion and planning Daddy and Mom decided to add an addition to the old house right next to ours and turn it into a place to stain and varnish furniture where it could then dry while Daddy kept on working in the shop without worrying about sawdust and shavings covering the wet varnish.

One of the first things that had to be done was finally remove all the antiques from the upstairs of the old house. Most of the things were piled together to discard but some of them were set aside in hopes that we could sell them to an antique dealer.

We children removed the bunches of dried herbs and grasses that had been collecting dust for years while hanging from the rafters. We stuffed them in boxes to be carried outside and burned. They were joined with rickety old chairs and numerous boxes filled with books that fell apart when you tried to page through them the pages having become yellow and brittle with age. Stacks of old letters and pieces of weirdly carved wood all met their fate on the discard pile. I felt a little sad to be throwing everything out, especially since John, David and I had become quite fond of this interesting room filled with old dusty things.

Once everything was sorted and taken care of we called an antique dealer to come see the things we had saved. He seemed very anxious to buy everything that remained. There was a box filled with hundreds of old marbles that he offered to buy for a dollar a piece. John, David, and I sat down to count them, putting them in piles of a hundred. We felt as if we had hit a jackpot!

Once everything was sold and otherwise taken care of a neighbor came by with a crawler to dig the ground away in front of the old house. Our rosebushes, and bleeding heart plants had to find a new home as the addition was added and almost a week after we started the project Daddy finally had a nice place to finish the furniture he made.