Furniture Friday: A Damaged Family Heirloom Gets a Second Life

Recently my grandmother was moved from her home of 53 years into a senior living center.  It was a difficult move for her.   Years of living in the same home allowed for a great accumliation of lots of great stuff!  Well....there's a saying:

That was about right in this situation!  My dad and uncle weren't really excited about a lot of the stuff my grandmother had.  But man oh man, did I love a lot...A LOT of it! 

She was relieved to know that some of her beloved possessions were going to someone who was related to her.  And I was grateful to have some piece of her life in my future home.  It really was a win/win!  She has been in her new home for two years (does it take anyone else that long to get working on a project?) and she is enjoying her life there! 

Back to the items, one of that I accrued was an old damaged hanging shelf unit.  When I saw it, I thought: "Unique"  "Family Heirloom" and "this needs to have second life"

Each shelf was made of very thin (1/4"?) wood with both sides of the wood covered in veneer.  The top shelf's veneer was completely coming off. 

At first I wanted to just take it off and leave the wood plain, but with how old the piece is, as I tried to remove the veneer, the wood started to come with it. 

Then I thought I'd just cut off that top shelf and keep the whole unit with just the two center shelves, but I thought that would look asymmetrical, and I kinda like symmetry. 

So, I took some wood putty and filled in the spaces that had peeled off.

 
The drawers were also busted.  And I don't mean that they came disconnected!  The wood connecting the drawer front to the drawer sleeve was severed. 

To fix that, I just used E-6000 glue.  Worked like a charm!  I'm sure super glue or wood glue would have worked just as well, if not better, but I'm packing at the moment and all I could find was the E-6000. 

After fixing all of the above it was just a matter of some primer (spray paint) and a can of my current favorite colored spray paint. 

Except for fixing the veneer, this project was finished in about an hour.