I'm sort of in love with a chair (Pics!) *

So, there TheMister and I were, driving down our street on December 9th, minding our own business, on our way to...somewhere. All of a sudden, I spot this chair sitting outside the back door of the consignment store on the corner of our street, right in front of the giant sign that says "DO NOT LEAVE ITEMS WHEN STORE IS CLOSED" or something to that effect. (Make a note of this. It’s important later.)

This chair is a sad, lonely-looking thing...but the back of the chair is gorgeous...curved and graceful. I ask my husband "Did you see that chair?"

He says, "What chair?"

I say "The one outside the consignment store. I might want to go check it out later!"

He says okay and probably forgets all about it.

When we get back home, I see that it’s still there. I want to go check it out, but I feel dumb and am still not really sure I want to take on another project.

But I can’t get the chair out of my head all day. So, I wait until 11 pm when it’s really dark and we’re about to go to bed and tell TheMister that I’m going to check out the chair. I ask him if I should take a car or bring a flashlight for light.

He says, "I can drive the truck."

We drive down there and he parks the truck so the headlights illuminate the chair. I jump out before the truck is completely stopped and start looking at the chair. I inspect the top of it, making mental notes about the seat being really dirty and having a funky smell to it, then flip it over and take a look at the bottom. The seat has cobwebs galore underneath it, but all of the the wood looks to be in really good shape so I tell TheMister I want it.

Then I explain (to him, but mainly to the part of me that thinks I’m now a criminal) that it’s not like it’s stealing because the store is closed, there’s a sign RIGHT THERE that expressly tells people not to leave stuff out there during non-business hours, and if I take it, the store will never know it was even out there. It’s impossible to steal something that no one at the store ever knew existed, and therefore can’t miss.

He says, "Yeah, I know," sets it on top of the tonneau cover of his Explorer Sport Trac and we jump back in the truck and drive the 10 seconds it takes to get home.

He brings the chair inside for me and we flip it upside down and remove the screws that hold the seat on. Then, just for shits and giggles, he starts sanding one side of the back of the chair. He tells me it seems like it’ll be easy to sand.

I say "HOORAY!" and try to figure out how I can keep myself from being tempted to go downstairs and work on my new project that night instead of sleeping.

The next morning, I go down and start working on it.

This is what it looked like when I found it:

Front view:

Side view:

See that white spot on the side of the back? I still have no idea what it was. Might have been toothpaste, might have been paint, might have been something I didn’t really want to know about.

Close-up of the chair seat:

Looks nasty, right? Well, I can tell you that it smelled just as delicious as it looked. The kitties were very interested in checking it out, until they finally decided that they could smell other, better-smelling things to pass the time. This picture doesn’t even show the mass of cobwebs I found on the bottom. I believe it might have spent about 15 years in someone’s attic before I found it.

So, I removed the nasty cloth covering the chair seat using a flat-head screwdriver to pry and pliers to pull all the staples out of the wooden part of the seat. Then, over a period of about 6 hours split between two days, I sanded the chair down, using a Mouse sander, a block sander and plain old sandpaper by itself. My arms hurt after that. But when I got it down to its bare wood, I could tell it was going to be pretty.

Chair After Sanding:

It’s naked! Naked, I tell you!

Staining the chair took a while and was made more difficult by the fact that the chair is made from a few different types of wood, all of which take stain differently. It was also originally put together with wood glue, which caused a few areas on the chair not to take stain really at all. I did the best I could with about three coats of oil-based stain (Minwax Wood Finish Oil-Based Stain in Red Mahogany) and two coats of polyurethane.

Here’s a couple of pictures of what it looked like then...

Chair After Stain and Poly 1:

Pretty, right? In the second picture you can see the areas that I’m talking about that didn’t take the stain as well...mostly the piece of wood that makes up the top of the back of the chair and at the top front of the legs.

Chair After Stain and Poly 2:

Then, I had to re-upholster the chair. (Yes, I definitely did. Underneath that nasty striped cover that I had already removed, there was an oh-so-attractive mustard-y yellow vinyl. Yummy!)

TheMister and I covered it (using his new air compressor and super awesome staple gun) with one layer of medium-loft batting that I bought at JoAnn Fabrics, then with a bit of fabric that I bought from the scrap bin on a whim at Hobby Lobby when I was there one time. I wish we could have figured out a better way to do the corners of the seat with the fabric so there weren’t any wrinkles or anything, but after my sewing shears and I got into an argument about whether or not my pinky was going to remain on my left hand, I just wanted to get the damn thing done before I bled all over the pretty new fabric.

And now, just in case you’ve forgotten what it looked like at first, I present a couple of before & after pictures.

Before & After Front:

Before & After Side:

I’m happy knowing that while I may never be able to complete a Physics problem without help or to calculate a tip at a restaurant by myself, I can look at an object on the side of the road and see it not for what it is now, but for what I could turn it into if I had the chance.

I’d love to do something like this again, preferably soon. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to drive around in Shawn’s truck during the next neighborhood trash pick-up day to go "shopping". (First Friday of every month! Only 17 more days!)