Paint-Dipped Plant Stool

It has been nearly a year since we moved, can you believe it?! Last year at this time, everything was chaos with boxes all over & I had a minor panic attack.  For real. Not saying that as an expression. I really thought buying a new house had been a huge mistake and nothing was ever going to be put away or organized and it just wasn’t worth it.  Someone casually mentioned that it takes a year to really settle into a house and my panic spiraled deeper. I need it all settled RIGHT NOW (like all of it settled immediately), NOT in a YEAR!  It seemed helpless to try at all.  I finally confessed my agitated mental state to a girlfriend and she suggested I make one area peaceful; she called it ‘making a sanctuary’.

The only spot I could find for this little patch of peace was the tiny landing at the turn of the stairs.  It’s so small it felt pathetic and sad and I thought it almost didn’t count.  I laid down a rug from my travels in India and filled it with plants.  Every time I passed through the landing I was reminded that one day the whole house might actually come together, too.  It worked. I could take a deep breath and calm down. Because of this, I have an odd amount of affection for our landing…just a tiny bit of real estate but boy do I love it.  The landing is a place I want to fill with plants and color and keep it my lovely sanctuary.  So, when my neighbors tossed out an old-beat up stool I snatched it up, repaired it, painted and polyurethaned it for the landing.

It added the perfect pop of color to the landing and was a nice break from sewing. It’s our paint-dipped plant stool and it is keeping the sanctuary dream alive.

Here is the original state:

It was falling apart at the seams with the finish flaking off.  I started by sanding the whole thing and then wood gluing it back together.

Once the glue dried, I wiped it with mineral spirits and taped, with blue paint tape, around the legs at the same height mark. I painted below the tape in bright yellow with a sponge brush.  I painted three different coats letting each one dry first.  The final step was to apply polyurethane.  I used a spray-on poly, applied outside, because there was some already in the basement.  The wood turned out darker than I wanted it to be but I still love it. Plus, because I found the stool and had the paint, poly, and wood glue on hand it was completely free. Bonus!

And here we are at that year mark.  The one where we are supposed to feel more settled.  We still don’t have many pictures up, the floors still need work, our one-hundred year old windows blow in a breeze on especially windy days but we are definitely feeling settled. We belong here and the work we do at this point feels more like tidying the nest rather than gathering the sticks and mud needed to put it all together.