It's Not Very Chairy, It's An Oldie But A Goody

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(My apologies to Brian Wilson and Jan Berry for thieving and altering their lyrics from Surf City. Not a big fan of 60's surf music, but that one was ok.)

I find myself itching to write about something. Anything. It just so happens that I have a chair that I finished a couple of days ago that would make a great subject. Conversely, I also find myself completely devoid of ideas on how to present the chair and its conversion from junk to...well, whatever it is now. I'm supposed to be witty, interesting and insightful, but I'm just not really sure what I need to do to hit those marks. I'll go ahead and let you in on a secret. If I achieve any or all of those milestones, it was by pure coincidence. I know that probably shatters your image of me meticulously compiling notes, writing outlines and rough drafts and sending copy off to the editor. Sorry, but most of the time I just wing it.

So, I'll commence to winging...

I used to work nights. For 5 years, I delivered newspapers 7 days a week, 365 days a year. 366 days in 2008. The US Postal Service makes that claim about rain, snow and gloom of night but take it from me...they have nothing on newspaper carriers. Tornadoes? You get your paper. 12 inches of snow and ice on the streets? You get your paper. Torrential rains and flooded streets? You get your paper. During the crazy snow we had in Alabama last winter, there were a couple of days when the mail didn't run, but the newspaper was on the sidewalk in the morning. Sure, there were streets that were so covered with snow and ice that I couldn't drive on them. No problem. I got out and walked.

I didn't see any mail carriers out there carefully navigating the frozen tundra, trying desperately to fulfill their duties.

I also didn't see any mail carriers fall and bust their posterior in the middle of Longbow Drive. Maybe they were onto something...


But, enough bashing the post office. I mentioned that I used to work nights to explain how I used to find all kinds of cool stuff sitting on the side of the road. And, because I was out riding around at 3am, quite often, I got the first look at people's garbage. I know how that must sound, but I actually looked forward to Wednesday mornings because I knew people would have their garbage out at the side of the road and I could window shop as I chunked papers out my window.


Now, don't get the idea that I furnished out entire house with other people's garbage. I also never got any food, clothing, medicine or personal hygiene items. But, I did get a good water hose, several lamps and light fixtures and a 1970's Marx Silly Sammy ride-on toy.

Don't tell me that's not awesome. I don't want to hear it and I wouldn't believe you anyway.


But, although Silly Sammy is quite cool, he's not the subject of today's post. Instead, I'm sharing the story of the chair I mentioned earlier. The chair was a side-of-the-road special, tossed out by someone who thought they got all the good out of it but, I'm happy to report that they were sadly mistaken.


As I rounded the corner, my headlights shone on the chair sitting in the gutter. I had to stop and check it out and, when I did, I decided it was worthy of saving. I put it in my back seat and it rode the rest of my route with me. When I got home, I put it in the garage and it sat there for a year or so before I decided it was time to do something with it.


That time was last week. I was moving some things around in the garage when I ran across the chair. I set it aside and decided I would put it on my short list. It didn't take long for me to get on it. This is what it looked like on day 1.

I don't know if you can see it very well, but there are heavy gauge wires underneath the seat. You can see a little bit of the wire through the hole where the middle of the seat used to be. My assumption was that they were put there to stabilize the chair and, after doing a little research, I found that I was correct. You also can't tell from the picture, but this thing was seriously shaky. There's no way I would have attempted to sit in it unless I wanted to end up the same way I did on that icy street with an armload of newspapers. Major ricketiness. (Yeah, spell check flagged that one)


I figured the best plan of attack was to take the thing entirely apart, clean it, paint it and rebuild it from the ground up. There were a number of nails and screws in this thing and they seemed to be in random locations that didn't seem to serve a purpose. Some were desperate attempts to stabilize the chair, but they proved futile. So, I removed all the screws and nails. Some of the nails sort of disintegrated when I pulled them out because they were so old and/or rusty. But, the funny thing was that even though I removed these screws and nails, the chair still didn't come apart. Even though it was shaky and rickety, it was still held together by the tension of the wire on the bottom. I had to find the right piece to remove and, when I did, the whole thing came apart easily. It was like a puzzle at Cracker Barrel.

So, now I have this pile of bones in the floor and I was hoping that I could reassemble everything correctly. I did have the foresight to label each piece as I removed it, so I was pretty sure I could put it back together.


I cleaned everything and got all the mystery substances out of the holes and crevices. Then I started sanding. I didn't sand down to the wood, but I did sand enough to remove the chipping paint and to rough up the paint so the new paint would adhere. My dad used to tell me that the best primer is the existing paint, so I went with that. The wood itself was actually in pretty decent condition. I was afraid I might find some rotten spots but everything seemed pretty solid. After it was sanded, I was ready to paint.

I decided to paint the chair white over the old white paint. I based that decision on two things. First, I thought that since it was originally white, it would be easy to cover with white. Second, and possibly more importantly, I had a half gallon of white paint that I found on the side of the road. Seriously. Early one morning I spied a stack of paint cans and I couldn't resist them. There were probably 12 cans or so in a variety of colors. I got white, orange, teal, purple. I even got a can of clear coat. And, most of them had quite a bit of paint in them. Some, like the white, had a half gallon or more. I knew that, eventually, I would get the chance to use some of them and this was a perfect opportunity. People throw away the coolest stuff.


So, I painted the chair in a weathered sort of style. Sort of a thin coat, brush strokes visible, little streaks of wood peeking through the paint. It looked pretty good but there was still a problem. If you scroll back to the picture of the chair in its "found" state, you'll notice that there's a hole in the seat. The original seat, probably cane or some kind of woven material, had long since gone bye bye. Not being adept at basket (or chair seat) weaving, I elected to fill the gap with good old fashioned wood. I cut a piece of wood to fit the opening and then secured it to the bottom of the chair.

In hindsight, I probably should have painted the bottom part. But, I didn't. Sorry. At least you can't see it, so it's not that big a deal. Now that the seat was complete (poet, don't know it, etc.) I could get down to the real order of business. The chair was...well, a chair. A nondescript, white chair. The tension wires are pretty cool, but they weren't really enough to carry the chair over the coolness threshold. It needed something else and I had kicked around several ideas. I decided to bust out the collection of colored glass tiles.


Tanya and I have worked on a few mosaic tile projects over the past year or so. We've done a couple of flower pots and we're sort of in the midst of a birdbath. That one's taking a while because it's fairly large and the tile pieces that we're using are very small. In order to make the tiles fit or form the design we want, we use the tool at the left to cut them. It really gives you a lot of flexibility in doing sort of "freestyle" mosaic tile work when you can make tiles fit that ordinarily wouldn't. Plus, cutting glass is kind of a neat thing.



Once, in the 7th grade, a guy brought a glass cutter to school. I had never seen one except in Scooby Doo cartoons, so my knowledge of its operation was somewhat skewed. But, it seemed that I wasn't alone in that boat. When word spread around school that he had a glass cutter, we all had grand visions of cutting big holes in the windows in Mrs. Blanton's classroom. It was going to be an epic day in the history of Williams Avenue Elementary! A day that would live on in the legends passed down through generations of future 7th graders! This would rival the tale of the guy (nameless, for purposes of this story) who rode his motorcycle through the hallways a few years earlier! We were going to be famous!


Sadly, the legend was over before it began. I don't really know what happened, but the glass cutter didn't work the way it did on Scooby Doo. I thought we would roll the tool across the glass and then pieces would just fall out. Didn't happen that way. You can imagine the disappointment of a group of 7th grade boys when they come to the realization that they would have to find another way to become legendary. Of course, the same disappointment and realization process happens to every 7th grade boy approximately 17 times a day. So, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn't that big a deal.


By the way, to this day, I love the story of the guy riding his motorcycle through the halls of Williams Avenue. I can see the teachers screaming and diving out of the way. Mr. Rupil shaking his fist in anger and threatening detention for a month. All the kids watching the spectacle and wishing they were the one on the bike, giving the finger to authority. I love the story, but I have some doubts about its authenticity. If you actually witnessed this event, PLEASE let me know that it really happened! I would love to verify this one.


But, back to the subject at hand. I started gluing tile onto the seat in a somewhat random but deliberate pattern. The glass pieces are all different shapes and sizes, so there's really no order to it, but they do need to fit together to a degree.

It took a little while, but I made good progress on the seat. I tried to keep a good mixture of colors and minimize the gaps between the pieces. I wanted to have some gaps, but not big gaps. Surprisingly, I didn't have to do a lot of cutting. For the most part, I was able to find pieces that fit into the spots I where I needed them to fit. I finished gluing the glass pieces in place and then it was time to apply the grout. I've always thought "grout" was a funny sounding word and I sort of laugh to myself when I say it. It's definitely one of those words that would sound really dumb if you said it over and over. But, I think it would start to sound dumb a lot quicker than some other words like, "location", for example. "Grout"..."Location"...On the scale of silly sounding words, "grout" eats "location" for lunch.


I'm digressing again...

Did you think I was actually going to get through this without going off topic a time or three?

Back to the grout...

I covered the tile with a layer of grout and made sure that I filled in the gaps between tiles. I used a powder grout that you mix with water. I have also used the premixed grout, but I prefer the kind you mix yourself. As I recall, I found the premixed variety to be too dry and I didn't care for the way it looked when it set up. You may have different results, so try both and form your own opinion.


After the grout dried, I used a damp sponge to wipe the grout off the surface of the tiles, being sure to use a clean side of the sponge for each wipe over the tiles. It's important to rinse the sponge when you get grout scum on it because, if you're wiping wet grout with wet grout, guess what you'll have on your tiles.


When they were all clean, it was time to break out the secret weapon to make them really shine. Now, I do realize that I'm publishing this for the world to see, so the secret weapon won't be so secret anymore. Of course, I'm operating under the assumption that someone will actually read this. As much as I like having a secret weapon, I really hope that a ton of people read this and I have to find a new one. But, I suspect this secret weapon is probably used by a number of others for the same purpose. There's nothing magic about the Publix brand of vegetable oil. I'm sure that Wesson oil would work just fine. Just put a little bit of oil on a clean rag and wipe it over the tiles. It really makes the colors pop.




After finishing the seat, I thought it needed something else, so I repeated the process on the two horizontal pieces of the back of the chair. It gave a nice balance to the whole piece and spread out the visual appeal. Now to fine tune.

When I reassembled the chair, I left out all of the superfluous (nice word, huh?) nails and screws. Because of the tension wire doing most of the work, I only needed 2 (two!) screws to hold the entire chair together. I did use another screw to attach a broken rung on the bottom left and I used 4 screws to attach the little curved  pieces that connect the back to the seat. I didn't want these screws to show, so before I put them in, I pre-drilled the screw holes with a countersink bit. This bit leaves an indention in the wood so the screw head goes down flush with the surface of the wood. I used wood filler to hide the screw heads (Can't see the line can you, Russ?) and then painted over the spots and touched up a few other places that needed some attention.


 

I also used a straight pin to remove grout from the little cracks and indentions in the glass. On this job, or on any job, it's this kind of attention to detail that really sets your work apart from others. Don't settle for "good enough". If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right. Now, maybe my career as a motivational speaker will really start to take off!





So, the chair was finally finished! From the side-of-the-road garbage pile to the finished product, this chair has come a looooonnnngggg way!

Here are a couple of other shots.

Considering where this thing started and where it ended up, I couldn't be more happy with the outcome. Actually, I would be happier if I found out the motorcycle story was the real deal. That would make my day.



My sincere thanks to everyone who reads my blog! I love writing it and I love working on the projects I write about. If you like what you see, please take a minute to share it with your friends, post a link on your Facebook page or just leave a comment. And, check out the links on the right side of the page. You can find me on Twitter and Pinterest or you can see a few of the things I have for sale.

Thanks again for reading!

John