Recently, I seem to have been in a wee bit of a funk. No rhyme or reason why, just a decided lack of motivation, inspiration and energy to do anything remotely crafty. I’ve done a couple of wee projects (e.g. Just Crate) but that was forced due to necessity rather than for the joy of making things. Perhaps the renovations that we did earlier in the year tapped me out of creative juice? Who knows…

One project that helped to get me back into the swing of things was this lovely little restoration of an antique blackboard. As per usual, dopey here forgot to do before pics…. insert face palm here. However the end result is awesome and I’ll explain what I did to get there and show you some cool little surprises I found along the way.

This little beauty was languishing away in the depths of my parents under-stair storage area. It needed a bit of work but nothing daunting thank gosh. So of we went with a quick sand and stain with my ever faithful Briwax (in Rimu), reattaching the legs (needed some new screws here), a quick coat of blackboard paint and reattaching one of the knobs. No sweat.

Unfortunately the roller at the top no longer ‘rolls’ but Mum has assured me that there were some cool examples of cursive writing that you could scroll through. Maybe one day I’ll be brave enough to open the back up and have a look… maybe.

One of the cool things is that it folds down into a writing desk upon closer perusal low and behold what did we find but etchings.

The bottom one – H.D – is my Grandfather’s  youthful rebellious scratching and as he recently passed, this makes it all the more special! It will be so much fun explaining it to future sprogs.