Old fountain saved from the trash heap
We purchased this old fountain a few years ago. It made its way with us to the new house- but we were pretty sure it would wind up in the trash heap. The fountain is made from some sort of resin that didn’t really weather well- plus the fact that it spent a year in a pile out in the elements didn’t help. It was in pretty bad shape, but I remembered how pretty it was when it was functioning and I hated to just toss it. I thought, perhaps, we could bring it back to life. Here’s what we started with- it didn’t look hopeful.
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The first thing we needed to do was to clean that sucker up. The Mean Man got out the power washer and proceeded to remove the muck and rough surface.
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It cleaned up pretty well actually and gave us a smooth surface upon which to work. We purchased several cans of Rust-Oleum textured paint. The can says it’s good for metal, wood, and concrete- but we tried it on this resin surface and it seemed to work just fine (I’ll update this post this time next year to see how it held up). It gets pretty bad reviews on Loew’s website, but as for coverage, it worked great for us. Here’s the evidence:
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I am so pleased with how it turned out! We put the fountain in our landscaping where we had removed a cherry tree that didn’t make it. I think it works GREAT in this space. It’s difficult to convey how lovely and peaceful this fountain is as it’s running. This particular fountain has really cool LED lights that create the look of fire and water in the evening which gives a particularly beautiful effect.
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It looks like the color is uneven but that’s just an illusion from the water cascading over the ridges. The paint coverage was quite even all the way around. Any little imperfections that are there are not even noticeable through the moving water. I added some glass beads to the rocks that came with the fountain to give it just a little more sparkle.
The lesson here is to rethink throwing out items that seem like they’ve lost their usefulness. We took an ugly, worn out, and seemingly damaged beyond use item and turned it into a beautiful landscaping feature.
