Before and After Chair

Before:

After:

This chair was one of my last flea market finds. I've kind of shied away from any more big project/finds just because they are so time consuming and time is hard to find these days. I use to see some things and say,"I can make that look just like that one thing for a quarter of the price." Now it's, "Well maybe I should just buy it cause then it won't sit in my garage for 6 months."

Well it took me about six months or so to get this chair done, it could have been more. It sat in my garage for about 5 months and 3 weeks and then the other week I started stripping the white and gold paint off of the wood frame. I originally was going to sand it, but the details on the wood were so little that I couldn't get in all the cracks with a sander. And after stripping it I realized how much paint was on the chair too. It took me about a week of about two hours each day applying stripper from a spray can. I started with one that you apply with a brush but that wasn't very affective. So I used this spray kind, Klean-Strip brand:

I placed the chair on layers of plastic and paper to protect the floor, but if you have a thick drop cloth that would have worked better. The stripper is very potent and chemically.

I sprayed it on and let it sit for about 20 min. then came back with a plastic scrapping tool and started to scrape the paint off. I repeated this step probably four times.

When I got to the last couple of times I used a wired brush to get some paint out of the fine details like the flowers and arm handles.

My plan was to get all of the paint off but I had repeated previous the step so many times that I was going to leave it as a weathered look.

I ended up taking it outside too, and spraying it off with the sprayer on the hose because some of those pieces just wouldn't come off cleanly after rubbing down with a clean dry cloth.

Keep in mind this was all before I took it to the re-upholsterer. So I didn't mind if anything, including the chemicals and water got on that fabric.

Then I ended up rubbing on a teak oil to finish it off (from Lowes)

before it got reupholstered, so it won't stain the white fabric. I thought about using a wood stain, but I'm kind of into the whole unfinished wood look right now, and I couldn't find a stain color that I could commit too.

And that's the latest project. Let me know if you have any questions if you are thinking about redoing any furniture. Happy Wednesday.

PS- Is this text font hard to read? I really love it but let me know what you think.