Restoring Chairs!
The story of our vintage chairs
I had seen an add on gumtree for the same style chairs up the sunshine coast, but missed out on them by a whole ten minutes! A few weeks later that same couple contacted me and said there is a lady down in Brisbane who was thinking of selling their old scouts club chairs! So ofcourse I was keen, I hired a trailer and picked them up that day! I wasn’t going to miss out
this time! The chairs had originally been school chairs, which were donated to the RSL/ The RSL eventually moved them onto the scouts group and then now have a loved home at Berry Vintage! I didn’t want to loose that rustic look to the chairs – so we decided to treat the rust with penatrol and cover with a weather proof gloss! They looked a lot better – however as time went on, I decided that they were a little too "Rustic” for the wedding industry so over the past few weeks we have had a production line of welding, changing over their bolts, cleaning, sanding, painting, sanding again to bring the rust back through and then clear coating. They came up amazingly! We chose 4 pastel colours and painted 12 of each colour. We also did a lot of cleaning of the chairs and we found mud wasp nests, graffiti, boogers and lots and lots of chewing gum! The funny thing was when we scrapped it off it disintegrated into a peppermint smelling powder! Yuck!
Of course the whole process
didn’t go off without a hitch – we had our daughter Onyx make a breakthrough into the garage and run across the freshly painted seats that were laying on the ground drying, and I also discovered her finger prints in some of the seats – so they had to be
sanded back and redone! I thought they were cute little fingers – but I don’t think wedding guests would have quite the same reaction! Of all the little things that when wrong – the biggest by far was due to our forgetfulness! We spent a
whole afternoon painting the chairs out in the backyard- and they looked perfect! But after dinner we both said we need to bring them in BUT we both forgot! Overnight it rained and because the paint was still drying it coursed it all to bubble and peel away:( We were devastated that we had to start all Again!!!
The finished products are great! They are all a bit unique – some have dents and bends, some are a little rustier than other but they all have their own individual story to tell! We cant wait to see them in all their glory at a wedding in the coming weeks!
