Chairs and More Chairs

 I should have taken a picture of what this chair looked like when Joe first brought it home after finding it abandoned in a back room of his office building, just one of those nondescript chairs many of us remember from school. With its light-colored plywood seat and back and metal parts painted a sort of vomit beige, it was more than a little beat up, the wood scratched and nicked. But it had nice clean lines - potential. And it was free.
      It looked much worse after it got left outside in the rain after Joe cleaned the garage - trust me, you should be glad I didn't take a picture of it then - and I wondered briefly if I shouldn't just forget about it. It sat in the garage for longer than I want to admit, but finally I took up the challenge.  

      This project wasn't exactly free; rather, it utilized things we already had: some Kilz white primer to paint over the by now even more disreputable plywood, Mod-Podge, a replica of an old (probably 19th century) map of France, a can of varathane, and some gold spray paint for the metal parts.
     First I lightly sanded everything, wood and metal, then I painted the wood with two coats of primer. When that was dry I sprayed the metal, the bottom of the seat, and the back of the back with a couple of coats of gold. I didn't worry about masking anything because what wasn't gold would soon be covered up; the next step was to cut the map into two pieces to fit the seat and the back, cutting them generously because it's easier to trim off too much than to add in more if you cut it too small.  (Sadly, we won't "always have Paris," because in the process of cutting and pasting it disappeared somewhere between the back of the seat and the bottom of the back piece.)

      I glued the map pieces to the wood with Mod-Podge, working slowly, a bit at a time from back to front on the seat and top to bottom on the back piece to avoid bumps and bubbles and wrinkles. It's not perfect, as the wood surface itself wasn't perfectly smooth, but near enough.
     The picture below shows one of the metal nailheads - there are four on each piece, one on each  corner, attaching the wood to the metal tubing. I didn't put any Mod-Podge on them but otherwise just laid the paper over them and then cut around them with a craft knife while the Mod-Podge was still wet. In a couple of spots I cut a bit too much and had to touch up those places with acrylic paint blended to match the map colors.
     After the Mod-Podge dried, I trimmed off any excess paper along the edges and painted all the paper surfaces with three coats of varathane, letting it dry completely between coats.

      The only thing I actually bought for this project was a couple of yards of 5/8" gold braid that I glued on (with E6000, because that was what I had and I wanted to be sure it would stick forever) to cover the raw edges of the 5/8" plywood. (With a 50% off coupon the braid cost less than $3 at JoAnn.) I bought a lighter shade of gold than I really wanted because I knew it would darken from the varathane I painted over it as part of the fourth and final coat for the chair back and seat. The braid is stiff and hard as a result; it should be as tough and lasting as the rest of the chair.
     The picture below is a preview of coming attractions. Joe found this oak captain's chair by the side of the road while he was out walking one day and brought it home for my study. I'd been using one of those balance ball office chairs, bought on sale and on a whim a few years ago, but the ball had suddenly begun to leak and I'd long ago lost my fondness for the chair as a whole. Its black plastic frame and the green ball really didn't go with anything in the room. Healthy but ugly. So rather than try to fix the leak or buy a new ball, we put the whole assemblage out on the curb and someone quickly took it away, just like Joe took away this chair that someone else no longer wanted. Recycling in its purest form: no money, no middleman, no waste. I love it.

This chair just needs cleaning up with Minwax refinisher or something like that, four nail-on glides for the feet so it doesn't snag the rug, and a nice cushion, and it will be exactly the desk chair I always wanted (though I didn't know it until I saw it).

A Sort of an Ode to Chairs

Every object has a story, I guess, even if it's just in its early chapters, even, I suppose, if its story so far is only of being manufactured and then shipped and sold in a big-box store. I know I often value things not so much for how they look or how much they cost, but for the stories behind them and the memories those stories evoke. Sometimes those stories go back quite a while, sometimes, as with this first chair, the part of the story I know, because it's the part I'm in, is just beginning.

On Friday Joe and I visited a shop we'd never been to before, Betty Blue's Junk Shop, on Plumer, south of Broadway, http://www.bettybluesjunkshop.com/, tucked away next an auto painting shop. It's lovely, to those of us who delight in finding a second-hand store with interesting items at good prices, with a friendly owner, and Betty Blue's has all those things. We found this little rocker for just $40, and it's not even a fixer-upper! It doesn't need a thing besides maybe a little furniture polish - oh, and I'll probably be moved to create a suitably retro seat cushion at some point. Bare wood's a bit hard on the bottom.

I love chairs (you've probably guessed that), and the oak rocker above is one of the first I loved, even though when I first saw it, it was painted a sort of vomit-grayish-beige. It's been in the family for 93 years, ever since my grandparents bought it from Sears Roebuck so my paternal great-grandmother would have a chair in which to rock my grandparents' first child, my Aunt Dorthe, who's still doing well all these years later, living on her own in Kalispell, Montana. That regrettable color, which someone painted it in the 1960s, stripped off easily, which was a great relief 20 years ago when the chair was passed on to me.

This Morris chair isn't a family heirloom, though I guess it's on its way to becoming one. I wonder sometimes what will happen to the furniture we've loved if our kids don't feel the same way about it. Well, this chair's story is an example of what might happen. Many years ago, I worked as a receptionist for our small-town family doctor. One of his patients was a very old woman who lived with a paid companion in a 3-story house filled with wonderful old furniture. When she died, her son came from wherever he lived to arrange her funeral and to decide what to do with her property. He came by the office and told Mac's nurse and me that, because we'd all been so good to his mother, he wanted to do something for us, so before he called in the dealers he let us come to the house to pick out whatever we wanted at rock-bottom prices. I paid $35 dollars for this chair and just $5 for a small oak cabinet. A year or two later a local antiques dealer (noted for cheating the people he bought from) offered me $365 for it, but obviously I didn't take it. I have no idea what it's worth, but it would have to be an awful lot to persuade me to part with it - I can't imagine selling it.

 

This little rocker is obviously still in need of a serious makeover. Joe wants to at least attempt to strip the paint off to see what's underneath - if we don't like what we find, we can always paint it a different color, and of course, either way it will get a new seat cover. I was driving down Grant Road when I spotted this chair outside a secondhand furniture store (of which there are many on Grant Road). I noticed the color first - hard to miss that green - but it was the lines of the chair that really captured me. I pulled in and quickly talked the owner down from $50 to $35. Maybe he would have gone lower, but I guess I'll never know.

This red chair is one of the most comfortable I've ever sat in, even without a cushion. And the price was definitely right - someone had set it out on the curb for the semi-annual brush-and-bulky trash pickup (that's where the little table next to it came from as well). I decided not to do anything to the metal frame, which has been painted more than once - most recently black, but turquoise and red show through where the black has chipped.  It has, as Joe says, patina. The wood had been painted barn red and so I just repainted that and I love it. The little table was white, more or less, and it just got a coat of turquoise spray paint.  Now that the weather's cooled off (they're predicting a high of 85 today), the little shade house/ramada is a wonderful place to relax, especially in this newly repainted chair.

And now one last chair, that I think must have been my mother's or her sister's, since it was far from new when I got it. I sat in it with my dolls as a little girl, and my own little girl sat in sometimes, though we also got her a much sturdier wooden rocker. Today this little chair is battered by time and no one sits in it now except Berthe Antoinette, who doesn't weigh much and who can be trusted not to play roughly. I suppose I should have it repaired, but for some reason I don't want to see it changed. Maybe I'll look into that, though. Someday.