My First Chair Refinish

Featured at Saturday is Crafty Day #60 @ Along for the Ride

This chair has been mentioned in my exploding eggs post.  Which was actually my first post ever.  And more recently here.  Well it's finally done!  After 2 1/2 years of sitting in my garage, bouncing back and forth between my house and my mom's, and causing a little mayhem, this chair can be marked as a completed project.

First I have to say anything I know about refinishing furniture I learned from my mom.  She showed me how to recover the seat, talked to me about pretreating the wood, and the best way to apply stain.  She's amazing.  What's even more amazing is she is self-taught in all of these things, and much of her learning happened before the wonderful world of the internet.  She's somewhat of a Jill of all trades, and she taught herself most of those trades before google searches and youtube invaded our homes.

One day I went over her house to borrow her staple gun and hear her tips on how to recover the seat.  I was excited with how simple of a process it was for this chair.  I should have known better, and realized that this feeling of ease was misplaced.  When I got back home and placed the seat on the chair I realized something.  We had recovered the wrong chair base.  The one we did was too big!  I don't know if you can tell by the picture, but look for the space between the chair and the seat.  It should be nestled in the sides, not sitting on top like that.  :)

I had to apply the polyurethane in one of my bathrooms.  The garage was too cold!

Well, I got the correct chair base recovered and set about staining the chair.  I would highly suggest pretreating the wood.  It does help!  I mixed a walnut and golden pecan stain to get the color I wanted.  I'm happy to say I love the color the wood turned out.  If you've never stained wood before, I suggest giving it a try.  It so beautiful to watch how the stain accents the wood grains as you apply it and wipe it off.  There is truly something gratifying about the process.  I was even a good girl and waiting the appropriate amount of time between coats and the polyurethane.  I'm not very patient, so this was a big accomplishment for me!

This chair will find a new home in my sewing room  I'm so excited to use it!

A Trifecta Weekend

It's a drill weekend (my husband's in the National Guard) which means it's mostly me and my little one for the next few days.  I've been making the best of it by working on projects!

There's been some of this...

This hats actually for me!  This is the first hat I have actually crocheted for myself.  I need to buy a little more yarn before it's done.  I'm excited though.

And this...

Quilt piecing.  I'm working on another baby quilt for a friend that is due in the Spring.  I'm ahead of the game on this one.  They're having a little boy, and it was challenging finding material that I liked for a little boy, but I'm loving what I found.  Some of it is Farm Yard Friends by Studio e.  I bought what little of the line was left at my local shop, but I might have to order more for myself.

And a little of this...

This is the infamous chair from my exploding eggs post.  I'm finally getting around to staining it!  Tomorrow I'll put the last coat of polyurethane on it.  Then all I'll have to do is cover the seat.  That's another story though.  I've already recovered the seat once, but it needs to be redone.  I'll save that story for another post.  :)

My daughter and I have also spent plenty of time playing outside and reading books.  In fact while I was staining the chair I lost her for a minute only to discover that she had climbed ALL the way to the top of our play thing (it's two stories and she's only 18 months old).  Which meant she had to climb up a ladder to get there.  Scary!  Darn little dare devil.

What a FANTASTIC way to spend the weekend.

A Chair, 18 Eggs, and a 3-hour Clean-up

This chair is a fantastic place to start.  My mother is talented at refinishing furniture, and once my husband and I bought a house I had the space to try my hand at it as well.  My mom passed on a chair to me.  A simple project really, sand and strip the wood, recover the seat.  Not much to it…right?

My husband is in the military so it’s not uncommon for him to be gone two days, two weeks, a month at a time.  This story takes place during one of his two-week departures.  I love my husband, but the house definitely stays cleaner when he’s not around.  At the time of this story I worked 4-tens so I was always blessed with a three-day weekend.  I started this weekend by cleaning the house so I could enjoy having it STAY clean while my husband was away.

The second day of my weekend I turned my attention to more enjoyable tasks, namely the chair awaiting me in the garage.  I attacked it with amazing energy, sanding, scraping, and chipping away the blue paint and stickers that adorned it.  I was encouraged with each large chunk of paint that came away, and determined to strip away even the most stubborn of sections.

After about 1 ½ hours of work I headed inside for a drink.  When entering the house I was hit by a burning smell.  “What?  I wasn’t cooking anything?”  The smell became stronger as I went down the hallway to the kitchen.  “Or was I…”  The eggs...I had started boiling 18 eggs that would be turned into deviled eggs for a large family get-together the next day.  They had been boiling for one. and. a. half. hours...

My confusion quickly turned into panic as I rushed the rest of the way into the kitchen.  Do you know what happens to eggs when you boil them for 1 ½ hours?  Well first, the water all boils out of the pan.  Then, the eggs explode!  Eighteen eggs all over my kitchen!

My house is designed with extra high ceilings, and in the main part there are three rooms with just partial walls between them.  This would be the kitchen, living room, and a room we use as a library.  Typically I enjoy the open feeling the partial walls provide, but on this day they facilitated the eggs spreading into three rooms.  Eggs were on the ceiling, on the floor,  on the couch, on top of those partial walls.  Everywhere!

After I cried, laughed, and sent my husband texts about it I finally set about cleaning it up.  During the three hours of clean-up I tried every thing from mopping the ceiling (not such a great idea) to bringing the dog in to eat whatever he could reach (my husbands idea).  The smell of charred eggs lingered for weeks.

Needless to say the chair got put on the back-burner after this experience…