Reclaiming a Roadside Offering

Recently I cleaned out our outside storage room and put a lot of castoffs on the curb, hoping folks would take them away. There were broken patio chairs, an old stroller--that sort of stuff.

Everything got carted off. All but this one thing:

It's a sort of a glorified hurricane lamp, I guess. I used to put a pillar candle inside it and use it outdoors on summer nights. It was pretty once, but then the plastic panels got all yellowed and one of them just died. But it did have a sweet bird on top:

I realized the ugly plastic panels were the problem.

And maybe a little overall grubbiness:

So I hauled it back from off the curb, pulled off (and tossed) all the plastic panels, and gave the thing a good cleanup:

Then I set it on the front porch next to a new fern in an old pot, on top of a cute old sideboard I bought for very little cash and painted a couple shades of periwinkle blue:

The hurricane lamp-turned-decorative-object looks so much better now!

And I think that little bird on the top is smiling.