Best Supporting Role by Sue Margolis

Author:Sue Margolis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

• • •

Hugh said he could start work on the shop straightaway. Meanwhile I went in search of an antique shop counter. Even the one or two I came across in junk shops were way out of my price range. Affordable and antique seemed like a contradiction in terms. Then I found one online. It was a Victorian, seven-foot-long haberdasher’s counter—oak with wooden shelves and glass panels at the front. It would have been unaffordable had it not been covered in pea green gloss paint. The dealer said I could have it for three hundred pounds. We agreed on two twenty-five, so long as I came to his shop in Surrey and picked it up. I hired a van. Another fifty quid.

The dealer—an old hippie called Ken—helped me load the counter, which came apart and divided into three just about manageable sections. When I got back, Rosie was waiting to give me a hand.

We lugged the parts into the house and leaned them against the living room wall.

Rosie chipped off some of the green paint with her nail. “Wow, have you seen how many layers you’ve got here? I can see blue and white under the green. It’s a magnificent beast, but I reckon you’ll have your work cut out trying to restore it.”

That night I ordered a couple of books on restoring antique furniture.

When most of the paint came straight off with paint stripper, I decided that Rosie had got it wrong. This was going to be easy. That was before I noticed that the paint stripper hadn’t worked at all well on the areas of the counter that were carved. And there were a lot of heavily carved areas—particularly along the base. I set to work with wire wool and a putty knife, but getting into all the crevices took forever. In the end it took five days to strip off all the paint. Then came the sanding. The crevice issue again. Another three days. By the time I got to the best bit—the staining and varnishing—my fingers were stiff and the skin on my hands was raw and cracked. I’d tried wearing rubber gloves, but the thickness of the rubber got in the way and meant I had less control over the sandpaper.

When I showed Rosie the fully restored counter, she said it looked magnificent.

“What a transformation. It looks so elegant and grand.”

“Oh, come on. It still looks pretty beaten up.”

“But that’s part of its charm. You said you were going for hipster chic.”

“But the stain’s all patchy. And what about the varnish? Look how thick and streaky it is. I know I should have sanded it down between coats, but in the end I got so tired and bored that I couldn’t be bothered.”

Rosie told me to stop obsessing and insisted the counter was going to look just the ticket and that nobody would notice.

I wasn’t convinced.

“Hon, you OK? You seem to have got yourself really worked up about this counter. It’s not like you. Is there something else going on?”

I let out a long breath.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.