Oof

Well I seem to be out of fire and inspiration today [cheering, off]

Cat has decided that, as my wargames room will be much more visible in the new house (being one of the 'reception rooms' at the front of the house, by the front door), that it needs to look a good deal smarter. One thing she decided to do was to stain & seal the wooden cabinets my toy soldiers are stored in - a series of 4 tower-drawers, and a large number of 3-drawer units, all from IKEA, and made of cheap but serviceable wood - that is, something with a discernable grain, not plywood.

We went on Saturday and decided on a stain, and she's been working at it, and I have to say the finished wood looks sensationally better than the raw wood used to look.

However, the fronts of the drawers are all finished with a heat-sealed laminate, a sort of linoleum essentially, which are almost impossible to shift. After a couple of experiments, I suggested simply spray-painting them with satin black, which looks smart and is fairly easy. As a result, Cat was busy working on them yesterday and left a bunch of drawers out on the deck to dry, in the strong sunlight, heat, and humidity.

Something about the conditions must have been just right, because on about 40% of the drawers she'd put out, the vinyl started lifting & peeling off - not evenly, and not all of any drawer of course, so now we have a bunch that are partly-laminated and partly the underlying & nasty-looking plywood backing. Oh well, back to square one.

I suspect we're going to have to refinish the fronts by screwing or gluing on a wood veneer strip, to hide the underlying variations. Ah, the joys of DIY <achoo>