Thrift Store Find: 1950s Chairs

Hey peeps. We haven’t updated in a while, but it’s for a good reason — we’ve been off surfing in the Dominican Republic. We’re back (with tans!) and we’re ready to kick this house’s butt. We split up and conquered two projects this morning.

Bradley leveled and set all of the stones in our firepit patio:

Here’s how it looks now:

We’re lighting our first fire tonight — geeked! While Bradley worked outside, I painted the trim in the office and hallway.

We also have to share the new office rug and the hallway runner we picked up on Friday. More on that tomorrow after the paint dries.

We grabbed lunch at a local brewery after we wrapped up our projects. On our way out, we noticed two chairs in a thrift shop window and we had to go inside for a better look.

These babies are a little dated, and the upholstery leaves a lot to be desired. But look at those lines.They’re 1950s fabulous.

They’re also well-built, really sturdy, surprisingly comfortable to sit in. At $5.99 a pop, we couldn’t pass them up. We threw both in the back of the car and drove home.

They’re not much to look at now, but we’re going to tear them apart and they’ll be reincarnated as something much more stylish. Bradley’s done some light upholstering for work — benches mostly — so we feel pretty comfortable trying our hand at this.

We have a lot of thick fabric laying around from old projects sitting in our garage. We dug around and narrowed our choices down to these two:

A black, grey, orange and off-white fabric from IKEA.

Or a black and off-white fabric, also from IKEA. This is the one we’re digging more today, but we’re not 100% sold on it.

We started by removing the cushions and stripping off all of the fabric.

There was a lot of staple removal. We had some painful flashbacks from when we removed our carpet last year.

By the time we finished, we were left with some plywood covered with foam. The back piece was in good shape:

The bottom cushion was super gnarly:

The foam had basically turned hard as a brick. It looked awful and it smelled even worse. Bradley used a scraper to remove it from the plywood:

We’re not sure what chemicals could be in the foam, so Bradley wore a mask. I’m not sure where my mask is, so I stood by the door and held my breath for as long as possible. My middle name is Danger.

After the de-foaming came even more staple-pulling:

The fabric store had already closed, so we didn’t have time to buy new foam or batting. That will have to wait for next weekend. Instead, we did a test patch to check stain colors. Bradley sanded the arms of the chair:

Then he swiped on a bit of black stain on one arm:

And brown stain on the other:

You can’t see much of a difference between the original brown and the new brown, but they’re completely different. The original stain is an orange-red. The new brown is more of a rich espresso — it makes the wood look like walnut. The black hides the wood grain a bit too much, so we’re leaning towards brown for now.

We’re going to sand and stain both chairs tomorrow. We’ll get to the lacquering and upholstery part next weekend. We have a little more trim to paint in the office, and once that dries, we’ll share pictures of our sweet new rugs. Stay tuned!

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