In Case You Missed It! My Restored Dining Room Table!

The photo in the page header right now is of a  wonderful old table I restored about a month ago, when I was just starting the blog and had only 1 or 2 followers.  Now, thanks to wonderful craftspeople like yourselves I am slowly but surely gaining more followers.  So for those of you that missed this picture before, I thought I would run it as a blog header for a little while.  If you would like to read the post on it, you can find it in the February 21, Old and Vintage Post section, located on the sidebar.  Later today, I will be posting Part 2 of  How To Refinish a Table.  So if you have a desire to learn how to produce a formal elegant finish on your dining room table, like I did on this one, make sure you check back later.  I will be showing the process I go through to strip old finish.  More later.  Rory

Weaving Old Chair Seats and Saving The Earth

No reason to throw this cute little chair away. It was originally made in the 1800s and the only thing really wrong with it was the original hand woven seat was missing. Weaving seats is kind of a lost art these days, and it is time consuming but not really all that hard to do.

The process is pretty simple. I wove most of this seat while watching the an olympic hockey game. The Canadians ended up beating the Russians badly.

Once I complete the weaving, I then apply a coat or 2 of amber shellac to really pull out the color of the grass. If you are going to try and weave a seat yourself, it is important that the chair be structurally sound. If any of the glue joints are loose, be sure and repair those before you start weaving.

This chair could have easily been thrown away. Instead it was able to be saved from the landfill. The owner didn't buy a new chair made in and shipped from overseas. No styrofoam, plastic packing material, MDF, particle board, or child labor was used. This chair will probably last another 50 years if it is taken care of. A good example of greentiques in action.

-Rory-

Dining Room Set Restoration

I thought I might post a few pictures of a dining room set I have restored to heirloom condition. The great thing about restoring old furniture like this is that the quality is so much better than what you can buy new for any kind of reasonable price. No particle board or MDF used in this set. The entire set is made of maple, mohogany and poplar. It dates to the 1930s but this style of furniture is still being made today. Why buy new, if a person can recycle old? Another fine example of greentiques.

One of my dining room table restorations.

This table is one I completely restored about 2 years ago. It belonged to a young woman in Greenville, South carolina who had inherited it. The table when I first saw it had some pretty deep scratches in it. It was very dark in color and there was some structural reglueing involved. This was not a restoration for beginners, although I will share with you some of the things I did to get the spectacular finish you see here. First of all, this table was originally stained very dark with a traditional red mohogany stain. I stripped the old finish off leaving some of the old red stain in the pores of the wood. This let the natural mohogany grain "pop", giving the table top it's tiger stripe effect. I then coated the top with 3 coats of polyurethane so it will last for many years to come. I sanded each coat by hand and them applied multiple coats of paste wax after the last coat of polyurethane. This table was in pretty sad shape when I started. It could have easily been discarded and sent to a landfill. The value before I restored it was mostly sentimental. Now it has become a treasured heirloom that will be dined at hopefully for generations to come. It is difficult to put a price on a table like this. Rarely do you see an antique one in this kind of pristine restored condition. New tables are rarely seen with finishes and wood grain of this quality.

The important thing to remember is that this table will now be kept and used by the owner, hopefully for at least a couple of more generations because of the restoration. Sure she spent money to have me do the work, but it was less than the cost of a new table. This piece didn't go to a landfill. She didn't buy a new table made in China. She saved some trees, helped the earth, and stimulated the local economy. She deserves a big round of applause. This table is a great example of a "greentique".