Two Pairs of Chairs

If more designers had bad backs, we would have more good chairs. ~Ralph Caplan

I know, I’ve been a horrible blogger as of late. I have many excuses, but I won’t bore you with them. Instead, I’ll bore you with the story of these chairs!

Check out the “before” on these suckers. I know, horror show! The unnecessary padding … the repugnant forest green fabric … the ludicrous red trim! Egad. I had to bring them back to life.

While I don’t know their origin, I do know that these once-comfortable oak chairs were shamefully tarted up by some brazen woman. (How do I know it was a woman? Come on. Would a man waste valuable baseball-watching time to do this?) And it probably happened in the 80’s, when everything was shamefully tarted up.

Anywhoo, there was nothing to do but remove the offending fabric and trim and see where we could go from there. Using needle-nose pliers and redhead ambition, I ripped the trim from the chairs. It came off easily enough, but revealed a much bigger problem: the fabric had been attached to the chairs with about 853,688 staples. Damn you, Unknown Brazen Woman!

I was in the soup now, so I just made a daily habit of it. Every day when I put Little Miss down for her nap and got my boy started on a craft, I’d sit down in front of Nate and pull out a few hundred more staples. There are staple lifters out there, but I found a small flat-head screw driver to be pretty efficient at prying (and better yet, already in my tool box).

Once those staples were out, I scraped off the foam, which Brazen Woman had glued to the chair back and pad (of course she did … harlot).

Then I used Goof Off and a paint scraper to remove the leftover foam and glue. The pads were obviously caned at one time, but someone cut a piece of plywood to fit the hole. So I decided to just roll with that and find cushions to cover it later. Since there were a whole lotta holes in these poor chairs, I patched them with Famowood wood filler (the best cuz it has sawdust in it) using a putty knife.

Then I sanded them down using my bitty power sander.

Now the chairs were bare … what to do with them?

I loved their elegantly curving lines and decided the best way to accentuate their shape was to paint them a light color. I primed them, then sprayed them in Ace’s antique white. Then I tied on these cool black and white cushions I found at TJ Maxx (set of four for $16.99!).

I think the effect is lovely and delicate. And they look sweet with this square oak table on casters. Obviously, no sane person would spend this kind of time on chairs, even if they got a deal on them at a tag sale or vintage shop. But since they were *free* from The Family Collection, it was worth it for me. Plus, now that they look like this, I hope somewhere Brazen Woman is kicking herself for letting them go!

The next post is coming soon … I promise!