Little lives: Antique hunting and restoration

This weekend was a busy one, so I handpicked some of the best parts of it for you. Tasha and I were wandering around an antique store in Rochester (NH) yesterday, when she pointed something out to me; a run down mandolin. I slunk past a lady to get to it, and found three really pleasant things about it: one, that it held a tuning well, and two; that is sounded beautiful. The third beauty of the mandolin was pointed out to me by Tasha; it was only $20. Once we bought it, its name became Mandy.

Score!

We finished our browsing in the store there (while picking up more half dollars for rings), and quickly finished up our errands...Or maybe we meandered….Hmm. Anyhow, after a couple of stops to a game store and a bath store, we got home to eagerly restore and re-tune Mandy the mandolin. With newspaper, stain, sandpaper, and a fistful of other tools in hand, we rushed outside to the work table, where we were eaten alive by both flies and people saying that this would never work.

Mandy was nice sounding, but she certainly needed a little love. There was a crack running from her bridge to the bottom of the body, and one from the bridge to the side. the backplate of the mandolin was warped in a way that would suggest that it had popped inward from the sidewalls, which felt harsh against the fingers. Whoever had owned Mandy before had tried to fix some of these blemishes with wood glue alone, resulting in some ugly scar tissue on the face and back of the instrument, while making some improvements of their own. At some point in time, they restrung it for a left handed person, despite it being set and notched for a right! How bizarre. Still, this was $20, and it was a service to the old girl to rescue her from a life of dust and clutter and hanging on someone’s wall, never to be played again.

First we sanded the face and back of Mandy, to get an even surface to apply the wood fill to. This actually took longer than we thought it would, because by the time we looked up, the sun was nearly down, and we had our faces inches from Mandy the mandolin, just to see what we were doing. Once the wood fill was added, we were working with the scent of the stain that stung our noses, and the limited light of the moon and stars, which really weren’t shining all that brightly last night.

This resulted in us applying way too much stain, and having to hang the thing up around the house all night last night, and all day today (and still the front of the instrument has not dried completely). In the meanwhile, we spend our time playing a new game we got while running errands yesterday: Ruse.

Ruse is a game that the two of us have been eyeing for the last few months, debating whether or not to spend the money on it. It was money well spent. The game plays almost like a mixture between clue and writing your own story. The story is someone has been murdered and you must pin the blame on someone else using only the cards in your hand (much like a courtroom case!). Each card you can use to place blame has a reason on it (like being cheated on or having the physical capability of scaling a wall, posing as the victim’s medium, etc.) and you have to give a reason why it is them, causing you to create a story on the spot. The game causes many a crazy story to occur and with cards that also get rid of blame cards, it is very interesting to play and we did so for a good two hours while waiting for the mandolin to dry.

It was only a couple of hours ago that the stain had dried out enough to mount the bridge and take some good pictures.