See the picture above? I am part of this garage sale group through facebook. This post came up for items for sale. Do you know what I noticed right away? The old blue rocking bench in the background. That's all I needed to see... that tiny portion of delicious old chippy blue wood! I wrote to her right away and asked if it too was for sale. It was :) I drove out to her house and the poor weathered bench was just as rickety as could be and had so much rotted wood. She was asking $20 and after looking it over I knew it would need so much work and ALOT of new wood. She was very firm on her price but I managed to talk her down to $15 (she obviously didn't know that the ants had hollowed out all the interior of the wood.)
When I got home with my new treasure, my family came out to the truck and said "cool mom, you brought home firewood." They didn't see the "potential" beauty in it that I did. My oldest son, Drew, however, my fellow junker and lover of all things old, saw what I saw in her. It immediately became a fun and challenging project for him and he went right to work.
The pickets along the back basically fell off as you touched them and the main support was very rotted. He is saving all the pieces possible. Here are the pics showing the progress so far. Will post "after" pictures when she is ready to rock and roll again.
So far Drew has built an entirely new frame (with extra wood we already had laying around) and has started on the bench itself. The original chains and a piece of the original frame, cut down to a smaller piece was about all that was salvageable. She is rocking like she used to :) Even though not too much of the original will be left... I ended up with a really cool pattern for a vintage bench. Will continue to post pictures of his progress.
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