Needless to say, the project is taking a lot longer than I’d planned! Welcome to my Six on Saturday.

This is what we started with – an old Rhino Runna barrow, which has lots of visible surface rust, plus rust bubbling under the paintwork. It was crying out for some attention, tidying up and a fresh coat of paint. I bought some rust treatment, a can of spray paint and some sandpaper and set to work.

You know I said I thought it would be easy? Well I fully admit I was wrong! There’s a clear top coat to the paint, plus what feels like 5 layers of paint to sand through before you can even reach the rust. I don’t feel confident using any kind of power tools, so this is all being sanded by hand.

The paint has blistered in multiple places on the flat panel, and each time I manage to sand away the paint on the other parts, there’s more rust appearing underneath. The rust treatment / prevention stuff has to be painted directly onto the rust, so as much of that paint has to be removed as possible, otherwise I’m just going to end up in the same rusty mess again in the near future!

Considering how long it took to get this far, I was beginning to realise just how mammoth a task I’d set myself. Maybe it wasn’t such a wise idea to try renovating this after all…

oooo do I see a space with no visible paint on it?! It took hours and even more sandpaper than I realised we had in the house, but we have semi-rusty metal visible.

Six stages later and I’d like to say this is where I realised I could actually finish the project, and show you a picture of the shiny purple finished barrow… unfortunately after that last photo, I abandoned the project for the rest of Spring as the allotment needed more attention.

Then in the summer, it really was too hot to be working on that in the garage, and of course the allotment had so much more watering necessary to keep everything alive.

And now we’re in the winter and I’ve realised just how much more there is to do on it!

I was tempted to ask Father Christmas for a new wheelbarrow, but having already got the supplies to try to renovate this one, and spent so long sanding it down by hand, it seemed silly to just give in and get a new one.

Maybe I’ll be able to do another update in the early Spring and say that this has finally been finished… I don’t relish carrying everything to the allotment by hand for another year while my wheelbarrow is out of action!

Don’t forget to check out the Propagator’s Six on Saturday  and read through the comments section for more blogs to check out!