A Sunday Redo

Wow.. where do I even begin!  OK... I was bored.  So I called my sister, Mary Evelyn, with thoughts swirling around in my head about a bench that was in need of a make over because she is my go to gal.  Especially on redoing furniture.  I think she gets the nerve of it all from our Grandmother, Atlas, who was the queen of stripping and refinishing furniture long ago.  I, on the other hand, have a fear of it completely... until today.  OK I do still have a bit of fear of it because I have a corner shelf that I really want to paint but cannot bring myself to do it, so I am not completely cured. 

The bench redo I had in mind is actually a church pew that came out of the old sanctuary at the church in Goodlettsville that I grew up in.  A few years ago they were remodelling the old sanctuary and needed to get rid of ancient pews and needed money for the remodel so they had an auction in which my sister and I both obtained pews.  So they are sentimental to us as well as cool because we sat in them as children in church.  However, since I have owned my pew one would think there was absolutely no sentimental value to it whatsoever because it has occupied a piece of the wall in our basement, half molding, covered in boxes of canning jars and seed sacks with sweet potatoes on them from the garden and goodness knows what else.  So, my thoughts were to bring it back to life and find a spot on our porch instead of where it currently lived.  And in order to put it outside I was going to have to put a finished of some sort on it to protect it so why not overcome a slight fear in the process!  All that said, here is the evidence of Sunday's undertaking which turned out to be a lot of fun.  So much in fact I found another piece of furniture that needed help (from being on the porch and drying out badly).