New Life for Two Old Pews

Several years ago the pews in our church were rearranged and there were four extra. Two went up to the balcony and two went down to the basement. The basement two probably should have gone straight out to the trash because they were both in bad shape.  One was particularly beat up and the other had a crack that had been repaired once but it wasn’t holding.

Originally they were beautiful, fine works of craftsmanship of a kind that is rarely seen these days, but “nothing lasts forever except God’s love” as my mom says.

But, we’re a thrifty congregation, so they both were kept. The worse one was stowed toward the back of the room behind some dividers and basically became a repository for other stuff that wasn’t getting thrown away or used. The other one was in the main part of the room, along a wall, also “temporarily” collecting stuff.

I considered making a cushion for that one, but then since it didn’t seem like there was a lot to lose, I decided to try refinishing “lite”.

Here’s what it looked like before

I sanded the seat down to the raw wood because it had deep scratches, but only lightly sanded the back to dull the finish. Then I applied a closely matching stain and followed with two coats of polyurethane. I didn’t do anything to the sides or the back of the back because they were in decent shape – they showed their age but in a nobler sense than the most-used parts.

The pew was resurrected! It looks beautiful. I’m glad it was saved and given the respect that workmanship like that deserves. You could say it got it’s soul back. :)

As for the broken one, we were green lighted to trash it. But instead, it received salvation too, at least part of it.

As we were taking the ends off in order to make moving it more manageable, along came one of the pastor’s daughters and she suggested we save the ends and see if we could make something with them as a gift for her dad’s 40th anniversary that was coming up. So we did.

At first we were thinking that maybe we could cut one of them down and use it as the background for a plaque, but then realized that the nicest part of them was the carving, and if we saved that and enough material to mount an engraved plate, it would be really heavy.  Plus, I’m not really a fan of plaques, in general.

Ok then, how about bookends? Heavy is a good thing for those. I imagine that most pastors have tons of books for their scholarly pursuits and personal enjoyment like ours does. and he really does. So, yes, book ends.

I enlisted the help of another church member who used his table saw to cut them down to size, and then I gave them the same treatment as the pew – sanded the worn areas and re-stained and polyurethaned them. Then we mounted them on a pair of plain metal bookends. My husband counter-sunk the screws (I didn’t know you could do that with metal - cool) and we also put felt on the insides so that there’d be no chance of scratching books.

I think you’ll agree that they look beautiful. Sure, if you look closely, you’ll see part of the cut-away on the backs from where they were originally joined to the pew, and there are some nicks and hammer indentations that were made while we were taking them apart, before we thought of saving them.

Our pastor was really surprised and delighted. And the “redeemed” aspect was not lost on him.

We creative-thinking people can get trapped saving stuff while we wait for inspiration (divine, maybe?). If you’ve got some things that aren’t going to be used for their original purpose but are too good to throw away or that have sentimental value, start thinking of them, or parts of them, as a resource for something new. Maybe you’ll harvest a new blessing.