How I Turned this $10 Piece of Junk into a Masterpiece

Beauty is in the mind of the beholder, just as I suppose ‘junk’ is… but when I show you how I turned this $10 piece of junk into a masterpiece, and you can really see the ‘before’ of this antique clock, I’m curious to know if you would have bought it for $10 if you would have been there???

This is the before:

The antique clock was in parts. The wood case and door were missing parts, the door falling apart with joints cracked and broken parts, some of the wooden parts looked to have been replaced and the worst part of all, at least to me, was the strong odor of old cigarette smoke it bore. I’ve become so ridiculously sensitive to that stench, it gags me! Yuck!

Yet, even with all that being wrong with this antique clock… I was thrilled to find it online for sale for $10!  (I’m sure my husband has quit wasting his time wondering about what I’ll drag home next… the bigger the piece of junk it is, the more intrigued I can be)

The lady that I bought it from said she thought all the clock parts were there, but didn’t know if it worked. Truth is, I didn’t really care if it worked… I thought it could be pretty, more in a sculptural sense of decoration on the wall, working clock part or not.

So the first thing I did was to lay it out on the table to try to analyze just what the wooden clock case, door included, was going to need to get it looking less like a piece of junk and more like a masterpiece. (that’s something my husband hasn’t quit wasting his time on… asking me why I would bring a filthy thing like that into the house and work on it in the dining room on the table… but alas, after 36 years, it’s just who I am. I am my dad’s daughter! 😉 Plus, I have plans to redo the dining room table, so I don’t care if a few more scratches wind up on it… but he doesn’t know that yet… )

Once I started to really examine it, I saw there was a thin piece of wood broken and missing from the bottom of the door, there was a missing piece of trim too, but fortunately that piece was found inside the clock, so I only needed to re-glue it back on.

The bottom of the clock case looked pretty original and intact. 

Just doing a quick online search, I found out that this clock was made by Badische Uhrenfabrik A G in Germany before 1900… Fun! My pile of junk is seeming a little more legitimate…

Now onto the fixing…

I found the exact thickness of wood at Menard’s for replacing the missing wood on the door:

I used a simple handheld jigsaw to cut the right size of wood for the patch. (of course I sanded the edges of the new patch before I glued it on)

Here is a close of of the crack in the door frame:

Using wood glue, I’ve found that just dabbing some glue on isn’t enough…

it’s much more effective to actually brush the glue around, being careful to spread it on the entire surface needing to be glued:

After I spread the glue to both sides, I needed something to ‘clamp’ them together.

These little ‘chip clips’ actually worked great on this small project.

The top arch detail of the door was totally broken and falling apart:

Here is a great example of why using a small paint brush for applying the glue is good…

I could really get into the cracks with the brush bristles and smear it all with glue.

There was some loose & missing veneer or thin wood pieces on the top sides of the clock case I needed to patch and glue too… Blue painter’s tape worked for me to hold those patches on until the glue dried.

I decided to paint the clock case inside and out, so I needed to remove the clock ‘guts’. To be sure I put them back how they were supposed to be, I took pictures of the clock guts with each step as I removed them.

Here’s a picture of the chime piece behind the clock. The CB is the identifying mark for the Badische Uhrenfabrik AG company.

There is the ‘gutless’ clock case, ready for painting prep:

To soften the hard edges where the old veneer had chipped, I just simply smoothed over them with wall patch and fill stuff, applying it with my finger.

I could tell the trim along the top edge of the clock case had been replaced in more recent years, and there was a rough crack along that edge. But nothing that a little wall filler won’t take care of:

After all the filler was dry and I lightly sanded it, it was time to paint…

Remember I said how the clock really smelled of old cigarette smoke? I cleaned the clock case, and glass with window cleaner and paper towel several times, but the smell still persisted. As I started to paint I sure hoped that the primer would seal the odor back into the wood.

That why, even though the paint I had said it was paint and primer, I still primed the whole clock first, just for extra precaution to seal the smell into the wood.

After the primer dried, I started painting…

This dark paint basically took 3 coats to cover completely.

I liked the dark robin’s egg blue color only on the inside back of the clock. (don’t ask me for the color… I custom mixed up a ‘batch’ from a few leftover paints I had)

It’s starting to look sharp now… and yay, the cigarette smell is gone. Whew!

Lastly, referring to my pics I took when I was dismantling the clock guts, I put it all back together.

That’s how I turned this $10 piece of junk into a masterpiece.

Truth is, this was a really fun project for me to just putz on, for my own use. However, if I was trying to make ‘a living’ at this it’d be a different story… I’m not sure I would have bothered with it. It took me a week, working on it little by little each day… I guess it depends on how much it’d be worth in this finished painted ‘masterpiece’ state, to decide if it’d be worth it for a financial investment.

The clock now hangs on the wall of the stairway landing, and guess what???

It works perfect!! Yup! The key was with it, and after I hung it, (using a level for determining where exactly to hang it, helped to insure it would work properly, if it was going to work at all) I wound it up and it worked wonderfully, keeping perfect time all week long! Wow, what a bonus!

So, what do you think? Is it a masterpiece now? Would you have bought it back when it was in it’s ‘junky’ state?

There are so many wonderful junky treasures out there just waiting to be flipped to masterpieces… Ebay is one of my favorite places for treasure hunting. What have you found lately?

Here are a few other junk projects I’ve snagged up and re-did!

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Yay!! This post was featured here: My Thrift Store Addiction

This post is linked up at: Savvy Southern Style, My Repurposed Life, Pocketful of Posies, The DIY Dreamer, My Thrift Store Addiction, French Country Cottage, The Charm of Home, Funky Junk Interiors, Between Naps on the Porch, Thrifty Decor Chick