Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Theater chairs - Now infestation free!

I found these gems on Craigslist and it was love at first sight.  What I failed to understand, as many do under "love at first sight" circumstances, is that turning these into something I could deal with on a daily basis would be a giant pain in the asshole. To this day, I still glare at them occasionally for all the sawdust I swallowed and the number of times they fell on me. Ah, l'amour, you fickle beast.

Here are some more "before" pictures.  While I cannot show proof that they were actually infested, I will say that I have no earthly clue how the fabric on the backs got so scratched up.  If that is not the work of a wild animal that is some serious voodoo my friend:
Anyhow, this was my first real wood refinishing project and I guess I didn't realize that picking things without a lot of curves/tight spots would be optimal, but a few hours and some angry biceps later and they were ready for staining.  I stained them a super dark color and finished them with 100% pure tung oil from this like this: The Hope Company 32TO12 1 Quart 100% Tung Oil or you can get some from this website: http://www.realmilkpaint.com/oil.html.  I saw some other tung oil at home depot, but it had all the nasty chemicals that this website was bashing, and not wanting to grow a third eye after sitting in my soon to be finished chairs, I went with the natural stuff.  The bonus was that it smells like peanut butter.  I seriously wanted to eat it, but settled for reeses peanut butter cups.  The negative was that it took fucking forever to dry.  The website said 1 - 2 days but mine was more like 4.  I don't think this should deter anyone from buying this though, because it looks great after it dried, and I feel much more comfortable knowing that if I unknowingly licked the theater chairs I wouldn't be poisoned.

Now came for my least favorite part, the reupholstery.  I picked a creamy white microsuede type fabric despite boyfriend's protests and my empty promises of curing our black cat of his scratching and shedding problem. I'm not gonna go into all the details, but I can assure you that the process blew.  I always pick projects that need new upholstery and only think about the fact that I hate upholstery and am bad at it later.  However, I did get to use my favorite tool the staple gun so all's well that ends well.  Long boring story later, here are the finished chairs:


I'm pretty happy with them, and cat has yet to soil them with his feline hair and nails, mostly because I keep them stored up.  However, I'm broke and need new boots because my vegan boots are the worst and the sole broke in two.  So this beautiful set of theater chairs are now for sale!!!  Let me know if you want to buy them and live in Portland.

1 comment:

  1. Those are beautiful! Can you come back to LA and fix my scratched orange couches? Oh cats... I love you but my furniture doesn't.

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