Tuesday 13 August 2013

Free Bed from Gumtree

I managed to get a free white bed on Gumtree.  I was looking at single beds and I was thinking I would have to paint one as I wanted it white.  Then I found a free white one.  The advert said it needed work, but as it wasn't far away I decided to grab it.
This is an after pic above.  The nice people giving the bed away showed me and it had a lot of stickers on it.  It was also a bit broken in one area.  It is not made of wood but medium density fibre board or particle board or something.  This means it isn't very strong and where it had  hardware screwed into it it had broken.  The screws could no longer grab onto anything and it was all fibres hanging out.  Daddy P fixed this with builder bog.  Builders bog is a filler but it is two parts which means it is epoxy based and much stronger than usual filler.
Here is a picture of the stickers.
I wasn't worried about getting the stickers off.  I think there are a few ways to get them off but the way I like to do it is with peanut butter.  Just spread it liberally over the stickers and after a few hours the peanut oil will have reached the adhesive and made it completely useless. Most stickers just peel off easily.  Some more stubborn ones may need to be torn or scraped a bit so the oil can reach the adhesive more easily.  If the stickers are nice and old they come off really easily.  I use this method on book covers too as it gets labels off really well.  But I only do it if they won't come off and leave a sticky mess behind.
The peanut butter method was suggested to me by my very good friend Katie who is a woman of many talents.
I left these over night and they were pretty stubborn stickers!
But once they were off and the bed was mended it looked like this:
Not bad for free.
I love it and we used it when we had visitors recently.  It was so nice to give my niece and nephew a nice bed each to sleep in. We had great weather while they were here and they had a lovely time seeing lots of things Sydney has to offer.


2 comments:

  1. That peanut butter trick is ingenious! I will need to try that.

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