Breathing some life back into some chairs

I get a lot of pleasure out of renewing old furniture. Why? I really don't know. I love to be creative and make something old and shabby look decent again and make it usable for someone. I find it satisfying.

At an auction this summer I won the bid on a set of 6 old chairs. This was a farm sale and the chairs had very clearly been stored in the barn. They were a filthy mess. Take a look:

These chairs were, in fact, so dirty that I wouldn't even carry them into my basement before wiping them down and stripping off the old fabric. Oh, I didn't mention that two of the six chairs I purchased were so beat up with chunks broken off of them so I just left them sitting in the farmyard. I took the four best chairs home with me.

The chairs didn't get stored for long as I had a nice, solid wooden, round, drop-leaf table that needed a set of chairs. So I painted, distress, and sealed the table and restored the chairs by gluing, cutting new seat boards, painting, and reupholstering the seats. Here's the finished product:

Here's a before shot of the table:

Thanks for stopping by my blog to take a look.

Using the Fence Boards

I thought you might like to see what I made with a couple of the fence boards I mentioned in my last post. The sign on the left in this picture was made with fence boards. The sign on the right is made from just regular boards from the lumber yard. Oh, I did cut all the boards with my NEW double beveled 12 inch sliding miter saw. Yeah! I'm getting rid of the old miter saw I bought at a garage sale that didn't have any safety features. I was thrilled to find a nice saw for a great price at Harbour Freight! Their 20% off coupon was a great savings bonus. Oh, back to the fence board sign.....

It Really Was An Accident Officer

Recently, I got the bright idea that I'd like to make a few signs out of some old fence board. So I posted on a local for sale site on facebook that I was looking for some. I got quite a few replies, and one family even offered the old boards for free! You can't beat that! So I went over to the alley where they said to pick up the boards. The problem was that I didn't see any of the houses that had an address posted. I went to where I thought was the correct address and I loaded up a nice big fence panel. Then I drove down the alley and saw some people that I knew. I asked them about the address; they said the house I was looking for was on the OTHER side of the street. Oh NO... I asked if they'd come bail me out when the cops came after me for stealing the fence panel. They assured me that they would. I drove around the block and took that fence panel back and put it back exactly where I got it in the first place. I hope nobody saw me loading that thing up.... how embarrassing. I drove across the street and down the correct alley, where I found the boards as the people had posted. I took about a dozen and now have them here at home. I haven't started the signs yet though. Whew, that was a close call... luckily nobody called the cops. :)

A New Booth Space

There's a very popular vintage shopping area in Kansas City, it's in an old area of town full of huge, shabby, brick warehouses. Many of the warehouses have been redone and turned into vintage stores. It's become quite a destination when all the stores (around 13 right now) are open on the First Friday Weekends. I've been considering making a move into the area for a while now and finally when a new store advertised they were opening, I got on board. I'm thrilled but scared about being in this area. I guess I'm most worried about being able to keep up with putting items into the store and wonder if my items measure up and will actually sell.

The people who run the store and the other vendors are SO nice; that's a plus! We just had our first "First Friday Sale" and it went well, but I was surprised at how much work was actually involved in preparing for the event! Luckily, I was able to hire a few young men to help with the move and a friend came along to help me arrange my items.

So in this post, I want to share a few projects I've been working on and some pictures of my new space.

Here's one project that I tackled for the store. Take a look at what I started with... a falling apart cabinet. There is one drawer and one door. I bought this at an auction for a quarter. Yep, you read that right; a quarter. Nobody else wanted to take it on. LOL The veneer was in horrible shape, I had little choice except to scrape it off. After that I painted it a green, and used vintage maps to cover the missing veneer. Here's the finished cabinet at home in my booth.

I had a lot of complements on this piece but unfortunately it didn't sell. Maybe at the next sale.

Here's another remake. A neighbor gave me this love seat. I really didn't know if I could do a thing with it. First off, It was absolutely filthy. So, the first order of business was to mix up a disinfectant and clean it up. I knew then that I wanted to paint the wood white and distress it. Then I had a couple of ideas for those cushions. I finally settled upon using two vintage seed sacks that I had been saving for about a year. You can see the result in the pictures. I really worried about how sellable this would be since it was so different. But somebody bought it for their lake house right away. That was quite a relief.

Here's a few pictures I took around the booth. The building I'm in was a bag warehouse. My booth is in one of the historic executive offices.

Thanks for stopping by and taking a look around. Oh, the name of the store is Le Fou Flea. It means "the crazy flea". Cute huh?

I linked the sofa project to:

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Have a Seat....

Well, before school was out last year, a fellow teacher asked me if I would recover some dining room chairs for her. Knowing that chairs are very simple, I said yes. Well I was in for a surprise. I'd never seen dining room chairs put together like this. My teacher friend told me that they were hand made and had been in her family for years.

Notice that instead of just having a padded board for the bottom these have frames and springs. They were really worn and somebody had stuffed some plastic bags under the springs just to keep the springs from popping through.

Have any of you ever seen chairs assembled like this?

So anyway, to make this work I had to take this apart, there were too many springs that were broken. Then I used webbing on the bottom of each chair. Then a layer of muslin, then foam, then more muslin, then batting, finally the decorative fabric that the customer had selected.

I'm pleased with the way the chairs turned out, and I hope my customer is too. Oh, I normally don't do custom work, I usually just do the work that pleases me and put it in my booth hoping that a customer will like it and take it home. But, being a teacher, and I had this summer pretty free, I decided to take a few custom jobs. I'm finishing up the last one now. Yes, there is one more after these chairs.

Here's the before.

Here's the after; a total of 4 chairs.

Auction Day

One of my favorite pass-times is to go to auctions. I've been going to auctions for YEARS; long before I started upcycling furniture for resale. But this is one of the ways that I pick up furniture to upcycle for my booth.

So yesterday morning, I set out for a farm auction in a neighboring town. The weather was beautiful for a July day in Kansas. The morning was cloudy, which was actually good because it kept the temperatures cool. The setting for the auction was quite lovely. Like I said, this was on a farm. So there were lots of open land, an older house surrounded with large trees, and many barns. In the afternoon the clouds disappeared and the sun came out so those big trees provided lots of shade and there was a cool breeze that kept the day very pleasant.

There was all kinds of primitive farm stuff for sale.... much of it, I couldn't even tell you what it was used for. No, I didn't buy any items that I couldn't identify.

There has been quite a few Amish families moving to areas close by in recent years. They too like auctions. So there were lots of Amish people there. I really enjoyed seeing all their buggies pulled by horses parked amongst the trucks.

I know the Amish don't want their pictures to be taken, but I was SO tempted. It was such fun to see the boys and men in their straw hats and the women and girls in their stiff bonnets and dresses. At one point the little girls were all playing behind a red barn on the farm, it was truly a Kodak moment but I respected their beliefs and didn't snap a picture.

Most of the items had been pulled out of the barns for sale so I bought some wooden boxes, old doorknobs, tools, and some VERY DIRTY furniture. I've never purchased furniture before that I actually had to clean off and strip the fabric off of prior to storing in my basement. But this I did. Just look at that dirt!!! Yuck!

I bought a shabby little cabinet with the veneer peeling and a sewing cabinet that I really didn't want... but I couldn't resist since both pieces were sold as a unit for fifty cents. Yep, you got that right, 50 CENTS. I'm going to try to upcycle them, and if they don't turn out I'm certainly not out much money. No pictures of those right now. I'll save it for another post as I do have some ideas of what to do with them.

I'm always misplacing my screwdrivers as I'm working on my projects, they had boxes of them at the sale. So I was able to buy one box of screwdrivers. Some look to be very old, and we all know how I love old (vintage). :)

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Yes, that big knife thing came in the box of screwdriver. Maybe it will be handy at some point.

Now that I have about an extra 50 screwdrivers I may be able to find one when I need it!

Overall it was a great day for an auction. I'm looking forward to working on some of my new projects. I'm counting down the days until I can move into the new booth space.

Junk Lovers Trip to Canton TX

All junkers love a good flea market! Lucky me, I have several junk loving friends... and of course I'm a junk lover myself! So, after talking about a girls trip to Canton, Texas for the First Monday sale, we finally made it a reality. Boy did we have fun!!! Unfortunately we chose a day that the temperature was 102 but we made the best of it.

The trade days is HUGE! We spent from morning to night seeing as much as we could but I know we still missed parts of it.

Here's a picture of me sifting through some junk. This lady had great bits and pieces.

Treasures everywhere you look!

The following day we headed a little farther north to McKinney, TX to enjoy their charming historic downtown.

It was a very fun trip with some long-time friends. Aren't those the best??? We're already planning our next trip together.