Shop Time Part 4 - Santa's Helper

Some of the toys in my wife’s kindergarten class were starting to get a little worn out. They were mostly in good shape, but they were in desperate need of some sanding and a fresh coat of paint. My wife asked if I could help her out with refurbishing the toys since I’ve been trying to do more woodworking in my freetime.

With a little bit of research, I found a good kit for tackling this problem. Our main concerns were that we need to sand down some of our trouble spots to prevent splinters, and that when we repaint we need something non-toxic since this is a kindergarten class, there is a good chance that these toys are going to end up in a child’s mouth. I already has some 220 grit sand paper from finishing my table and benches. That seemed to be a good fine grit for smoothing out some of the rougher spots on the toys.

Next I needed to source some non-toxic paint. I found a good set of non-toxic acrylic from my nearest craft story. Since chrildren’s toys tend to be very primary color heavy, I was able to color match most of the toys with just the colors in the set. That way I only had to mix a couple of colors myself and did my best to match the color of the existing toys.

For the rest of my tools in this project, I used some brushes that my wife and I got from a paint and sip class that we used to go to. I ended up cutting off a piece of cardboard from the recycling pile in the garage to make a pallete. Then I discovered that we didn’t have any disposable cups to rinse brushes with, and decided to use an earthware jar from Tiquila Mexico that was sitting in a cupboard.

In total, it took about of month of squeezing in painting time when I could to get the entire set back into my wife’s Kindergarten class. I ended up getting it all done by Thranksgiving, but thought I’d make a write up of this probject for a Christmas post. The following is an assortment of pictures that I took while working on this little side project.