The Tale of the Naively Stained, Yet Satisfyingly Finished Crib!

WOW! I am absolutely the worst at updating this thing...a problem I will try and fix. I thought since it had been a couple months I would divulge all the on-goings of our little lives over the last few weeks. Probably the biggest thing is that we have finally...yes FINALLY...finished our crib for little junior. For those of you who may not know my parents offered us their old crib. Initially Mike and I thought this was great! The crib is classically old, extremely sturdy and beautiful. Not to mention it is made from Maple wood and would look amazing with the right stain. The only problem was that years ago it was painted white and the paint had since faded to a dirty, yellow spackle and so we thought (famous last words right here) "No problem, we'll just strip the paint and finish it!" Awwww...to be young and naïve! Well, two months ago we took the crib back to our place and made a trip to Walmart and bought the necessities (so we thought) consisting of paint stripper, wood wash and a small can of stain. We went home and the next day and began working.

It probably only took us about 10 minutes to realize that when we thought we had bought the necessities, we had really only bought the bare minimum and I mean the barest!!! So we went to Honk's (Always an Adventure...Always!) and got a few more paint brushes, some paint scraping tools and a bit of sandpaper. Things got a bit better from that point on and we were able to scrape a good amount off. However...let me point this out...when I say we were able to scrape a good amount off that really only included one side of one of the four panels! YIKES!!!! This was going to take a lot longer than we thought! Well, after about 4-5 hours that first day we threw down our $1 scrapers and called it good! We thought, "Well, we are just learning and we did have to make a detour to buy more supplies. I bet we'll get this done next Saturday when we have a little more time." HAH!!! Notice the naiveness going on here? Well, what followed soon after was NOT one magical Saturday of laughing, working together and ending with a beautifully finished Maple crib...N-O-O-O-O...what followed were a couple more repeated Saturdays of gooping on chemicals, scraping it off, sanding down imperfections, and hunching my off-centered, wobbly, pregnant woman body over those hunks of wood for hours on end. I could feel the disks herniating!

Anyway... after these first few Saturdays reality did come and bite us in the you-know-where and we realized what a beast of a project we had undertaken. In fact things got bad and we soon found ourselves coveting cribs (the kind of coveting like unto when David witnessed good ol’ Bathsheba) as we made our repeated trips to Walmart in order to replenish our supply of paint stripper (no, dummy, one can is NOT enough!). Well, as I said, the reality was fast open us and our hopes of getting this crib done and looking good were beginning to dwindle. The worst part probably came when we began trying to get the paint off the skinny, delicately carved slats on the long panels of the crib. Hey folks, these are a beautiful feature, but when you try and take paint off of them they soon begin to mirror the spikes from Satan’s pitch fork. Well, over the course of those Saturdays we had acquired a few tools from my parents including two electric sanders and a dremmel tool which proved useful for getting the paint out of the little crevices in the skinny slats. However, on one of these Saturdays, it gave up the ghost and burned out. What we were going to do?! It was the only tool that would work! So…we made another trip to Walmart and bought a new one. Not too bad, but with all the expenses we had thus incurred we went a little cheap and bought the most inexpensive kind. Well…we soon learned that cheap does not equal good quality when comes to dremmel tools and our newly purchased equipment would only work for about 10 minutes before the battery would die. Well, clearly this wouldn’t do and so we made our 42^nd trip to Walmart (they sure better appreciate our business) and bought a better tool which proved to be magnificently more powerful but it would actually burn the wood when we used it. Whatever, to heck with it, we figured we could cover the little burn marks with the stain so we plunged on. Eventually the day came when we began to stain. I was thrilled…finally we could see what the finished product was to look like. BUT let me tell you when we put on that first coat of stain instead of hiding all the burned marks and scrapes, it MAGNIFIED them! How could this be?!?! Needless to say at that point I went completely hormonally-imbalanced-pregnant-woman on my dear husband and in tears declared that we were either going to buy one right then or paint this beast back to white!!! I was serious too…if Mike hadn’t been able to sweetly calm me down and help me see reason I would have gone to the store and spent all our savings to get a new crib! Well…as you can see I could easily continue expounding upon all the minute details of this process which, to me, were now beginning to rival labor but I won’t. It took us another few Saturdays and then to our everlasting joy and triumph yesterday at approximately 12 noon we finished it! Sound the bells and call up “Motab” to begin the Hallelujah chorus! We finished, we finished, we finished and as of yesterday we put it up in the baby’s room and adorned it with all the bumper pads, blankets and sheets we had bought and it looks WONDERFUL! Sure, if you look closely you’ll find plenty of imperfections…bits of paint, scrapes, burn marks and uneven stains but to me it is simply heaven. It’s true when “they” say that in the end hard work pays off. In this case it really does…I can’t remember the last time I felt so satisfied! All in all what a great lesson to learn and albeit hard, it was a good experience. That kid of ours better know how much he love him!

Conclusion: I do just want to get a little sentimental for the moment and thank my cute husband, Mike, because he really did the bulk of this project. In fact, he worked so hard on it the last few days that he threw his back out…he really did! He is currently sleeping (it’s 9 am on a Sunday morning) because he couldn’t sleep last night it hurt him so bad! He is pretty stupendous and I’m so extremely grateful that he pushed me to get it done.

HALLELUJAH!!!