An Armoire!

I had secretly been hoping, for several years, to eventually find an affordable antique armoire to use as a linen closet since we somehow neglected to include one in our house plans, probably because the house didn't have one before.

So about six weeks ago, one magically appeared in a thrift store for an extremely low price.  Since that time it's been mostly out on the back porch where I have been working hard to sand all of the dirt and cooties and paint splatters off of it, and to let it air out.  I also thoroughly cleaned it with mineral spirits.  Old furniture sort of creeps me out because of the potential for old mildew smells and the smells of people I'm not related to, but I've always liked the idea of it, and I love how it looks.  So I decided to suck it up and get over the ick factor and make this potentially beautiful piece of furniture my own.  Fortunately it had no mildew smell whatsoever, and no cigarette smell either, and none emerged.

When it got cold we brought it inside and I've been busy refinishing it ever since.  As I was working on it I started thinking about who might have owned it and how such a magnificent piece of furniture had ended up in a thrift store after all these years.  I started concocting various scenarios based on what I smelled and what I saw as I was working on it.  And now that it is back in a caring home I feel like I am a part of its history too.

The first smell that emerged as I was sanding it was kind of a perfumey rose scent.  It was pretty disgusting.  When we bought it I told Doug that if it ended up smelling any kind of way that I found to be intolerable, we were going to have to get rid of it.  I'm really sensitive to certain odors and it's kind of a random assortment - I never know what's going to set me off.  So when I first got a whiff of the rosy smell I immediately thought that someone had sprayed something in there to mask some other more icky smell.  That didn't turn out to be the case, so I moved on to the idea that it was the perfume in the clothes of some nice old lady from the 1930s or 40s who was using the armoire to store things, rather than as an active day-to-day closet.  And I was okay with that.  I imagined that she lived in a nice old house in a pleasant neighborhood.  I think I was definitely tilting in the direction of my grandmother's house in my various imaginings.

There were tiny white paint spatters all over the outside, as if somebody had been painting their ceiling with a roller and hadn't bothered to cover it up the armoire to protect it from the paint.  I thought maybe it had been passed along to an unappreciative daughter or son, or grandchild, who didn't care whether it got messed up.  And later they couldn't sell it because it was so beat up and had those paint spatters on it, and then it was so huge that it wouldn't fit in the next place they moved to, so they just dropped it off at the thrift store.

By that time I was feeling really sorry for it, with its sad history of abuse and neglect.  And I was also becoming more attached to it as I attempted to bring it back to its former glory, hoping that it would feel better after I finished making it look good.  There's something about grooming an old piece of furniture or an old instrument or an old anything - once you start taking care of something you start to care about it more than you otherwise might.

I got one additional whiff of something or other when I started polyurethaning the inside, in my attempt to seal in all the cooties, so that I wouldn't have to worry about the germs of a stranger anymore.  It had stopped smelling at all, so I was feeling really hopeful that it would work out for me.  Suddenly, I guess from the wetness of the polyurethane, another kind of sweet smell emerged that sort of reminded me of unsmoked pipe tobacco.  So there was a husband using this armoire too!  He probably hung his suits in there after smoking his pipe down in the parlour, maybe with a packet of pipe tobacco still in his jacket pocket.  He was probably using it before his wife did, because her scent went away with the first sanding, and his got activated afterwards by the polyurethane.

And now there's no more smell because the polyurethane has dried and sealed everything in.  That's kind of sad in a way, but now I'll be able to enjoy this beautiful and useful piece of furniture for the rest of my life.

I forgot to take a "before" picture, so all you'll get to see is how it looks now.  It was a lighter color, more reddish, and really beat up.  I used the leftover stain from my parents kitchen cabinets to get it to the color I wanted and then gave it two coats of polyurethane, so it will stay looking good for a long time.  Doug did a few little structural repairs and now it is as good as new!