Downcycled

The current craze for upcycling, the euphemism for badly painting any old piece of furniture has a lot to answer for. Today's misguided buy at the boot sale is the nest of three pebble tables pictured above. The seller had found them in a shop just after the vendor had committed an atrocity with a paint brush and some chalk paint. He knocked a tenner off his price without even being asked so I thought I would take a punt. Underneath they are dark finish but with the top of the middle one suffering some joint separation and all three having marks on the tops they are candidates for a complete strip, sand and refinish job. I've always been a bit ambivalent about sets of Ercol pebble tables as the smallest one really isn't much use. Prices have shot up since the design was reissued so I had resisted the temptation to add a set to my collection. (That didn't stop me buying an immaculate single large pebble in Golden Dawn last year as we did need a small coffee table for the garden room.) The paint job may be hiding a multitude of sins but hopefully I will end up with set restored in light finish that are in nice enough to use but not valuable enough to worry about.