Umbrella Stand

My wife and I love to peruse small antique shops and think nothing of driving 100 miles or so in all directions persuing our interest. One day about 2 years ago we happened upon a small shop in south Jersey that had a nice little Ebonized etegere which we subsequently bought. The owner pointed me to a garage out back with some furniture in it and in the corner of the damp, cold garage was what looked like to me the mother of all cast iron umbrella stands. Standing 38 inches tall and 22 inches wide and covered with so many layers of paint and so much rust, it was hard to see its former glory, but I knew it was something special. I had of course seen the really tall racks with the mirror and the smaller ones that are very common but this was of the likes I had never seen before. I said to my wife, Helen, "boy, now there's something that was really nice...Once!

A year went by and we visited the shop again and they were closing and everything was on sale. Well the stand was still there and my wife suggested to me that it would be a nice project for me to undertake restoring it. I shuddered at the thought but asked the owner how much for that old umbrella stand and he quoted me a price that was really low. After some thought and some cajoling from Helen, I said what the heck, it's a nice project and I'll put it in the garage and maybe in the spring when its warm outside I'll tackle it in the driveway.

As found:

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j285/zekenstein/hp_scanDS_71811173837.jpg

I was putting the snow blower back in the garage a few weeks later after clearing the driveway and walk of snow and I got to looking at the stand. On a whim, I took a rubber mallet and freed one of the drip pans, both of which were painted on very tightly and brought it inside. I started working on removing the paint and I am not using the word "working" lightly. I have no idea what kind of paint they used back then but it extremely resistant to paint remover, especially the older layers. So I went at it tooth and nail with razor blades and steel brushes I found that the old iron underneath all this was in beautiful condition. Well, I had surely opened a can of worms for myself because I brought the monster downstairs with some help from my son to lug it and put it on the workbench. Now I think this thing was outside on a porch or perhaps in a garden for a long long time. It had been painted many times and as it alligatored it was painted and repainted and I guess no matter how bad it looked they just kept painting over it. In places the paint was fully an eighth of an inch thick so I had a project indeed.

Still, I have a penchant for doing mundane tasks so I'd sit down there after dinner with a beer and my CD player for company and watched the rococo curves come to back life as I stripped off their prison of paint. It became intoxicating watching the beauty unfold as I worked with exacto knives and steel wool. I felt like a prehistoric dental assistant removing the tartar from the molars of a mighty mammoth and in time I was almost there:

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j285/zekenstein/IMG_0022.jpg

Determined to remove every last vestige of paint I finally got down to bare metal. The final layer of paint was green with a white coat underneath which I am sure was some kind of primer, of course these were the toughest to remove. Many coffee cans filled with paint chips, several pints of extremely noxious paint remover, how many razor blades and packages of steel wool later it was ready to paint. My wife and I picked out a green a little lighter than its original color from Benjamin Moores historic line of American paints. A coat of primer and 3 coats of alkyd and it was ready to put upstairs in our home.

http://i83.photobucket.com/albums/j285/zekenstein/IMG_0105.jpg

The picture is minus one drip pan to show some detail. I am proud of this project and I have about 50 hours into it, but we get many compliments from visitors about how nice it is.

I emailed a picture of the finished stand to the person I bought it from to his new location in Boston and he jokingly offered me a full refund on it  :D

What a great story and what a beautiful umbrella stand!  Thanks for sharing.  Charles.