Close-up of a couple of repairs.
and the summer morning reveries back to my childhood years have moved on to current thoughts and goals. Last night I finished another of the items on my summer To Do List: restore the rattan loveseat here in the greenhouse. This seems like a good thing to celebrate now that it is wet and breezy, with the sounds of children playing now coming from the schoolyard playground a few blocks away, and not from the neighborhood cul de sac. Raindrops and cedar leaves are landing softly on the overhead windows here in the greenhouse.
We added this greenhouse in 1982. The story of this construction project, best told by Rick, is now an oft-recounted tale when friends ask about this space. I'll save that fraught story for another time, except to say that once the addition was standing, and standing without the poured concrete foundation having given way to becoming a lake of fresh cement overtaking the back yard, we thought to buy a nice rattan loveseat for it. The glass table came later.
The beautiful, original wrapping technique.
Fast forward to 2019 when Rick and I began shopping for a new rattan loveseat. I wish now that I'd taken a true "before" photo at the beginning of the summer, before I opted to restore this one, but I didn't. Imagine the finer rattan wrapping missing from many areas of the frame, especially where 37 years of direct sun hit them. Many dangling ends poked out as the brittle material, originally wound by careful Maylasian craftspeople, had snapped off. Faded and discolored, the still-sturdy loveseat spoke to me:
Restore me. I had to respond. Besides, all the potential replacements we found were made of resin, not rattan, and they were too big, too expensive, and, well, just not right.
Last night I put the final touches of polyurethane finish on our little beauty. It is sporting its third set of cushions, by the way. Rick bought these last year prior to a party we held. Today I am celebrating the first day of autumn by checking this project off the summer list! ~~~(P.S., it is now October 5)
Voilá. Good for another few decades!
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