The wagon wheel

In the previous post I finally showed you that old wagon wheel again which I bought in February, I worked on it on and off for about 3 months and in the end decided I really didn't like the finished look and I just put it away until I started decorating my IKEA shelf for the summer. So here's what happened to the wheel before it finally ended up on that shelf.

I started by cleaning the metal frame, I just used sand paper on all the metal parts, dont worry it is normal for the metal to actually look more rusty than it did before.

Then I put masking tape on all the wood areas that are close to metal.

I used black paint to paint the frame and the metal in the middle. Actually now that I look at this again I think the wheel looks fine like this! But I didn't leave it alone...I had big plans for this baby...

I had this nice turquoise varnish, I wanted to paint all the wood that color and then hang the wheel on one of the walls in the dinning room area and add the letter N E S W around it to make it look like a compass I probably would have added an inspirational quote as well. Anyway, when I saw what the varnish looked like on the wheel I was very disappointing, I think the wood was just too old and had so many holes in it that it just absorbed most of the varnish. I think I did three coats and it still looked yuk.

So then I painted it off white...I didn't like that I either so I sanded it down to make it look old again but I still didn't like that so I started staining it with a walnut stain.

Until it looked like in this last picture. I really hated it, I didn't have anywhere to put it and it was so far from my original idea that I just put it away and didn't think I'd ever use it...until summer came along, now I actually like my wheel! Ok, I could have done a better job of covering the black parts with masking tape during my project but I was so fed up with that wheel that I didn't even bother anymore...oh well.