BEFORE & AFTER: Remember those grates?

Flashback to this post from many moons ago. 

To think how foolish I was to try and scrape them myself...?? Thanks to the excellent advice from my aunt, we found a local sandblaster to take the project off our hands. Mr. B picked up the finished product last night, and they look fabulous.

Poor lighting - sorry!

It would have taken me years to the get paint out of this intricate detail!

The sandblaster suggested I spray a laquer (clear?) on top of them to protect the metal as it's exposed right now and could rust in the future. Advice welcome on what kind of laquer and how to apply...

But there's more!  We also shipped the rocking chairs off with the sandblaster too.  Long before this blog was even created, and before TAH was really ours, we found two old rockers at the auction (surprise, surprise).  Hello front porch sittin'.

Of course, they were an ugly green and we needed to strip them and repaint them. We spent a grueling afternoon in the August heat last summer for hours scraping those puppies down. We hardly made any progress. (And no pictures?) The sandblaster offered to strip them on the caveat that the process would further expose the grains in the wood, so therefore, when we repainted, you would see the wood grains.  Fine by me!

Hopefully the weather will be nice enough this weekend to sit on the porch with a glass of wine get started on painting those rockers. 

Maybe, I'll spend a little time tonight online shopping for some new cushions for the chairs too! Anyone seen any great outdoor furniture sales?