#restoring furniture

[comfortableinthesilence]

Who needs friends to do fun stuff with on a weekend when I have my hard rock playlist on full blast, Jack Daniels with coke and restoring/spray painting stuff from a discount store for my place! Decided to stop fighting my depression and lean into till it eases so time to add some dark gothic style decor to my place ☠️👻🖤

[shiftythrifting]

Legit cabinet being sold at a Habitat for Humanity. Either $10 or $70

Talked with some friends familiar with stuff like this… can’t be verified of authenticity… but there’s also high skepticism.

Talked with my STEM friends. Range of reactions across various fields.

Construction: Osha violation for sale

Enviromental scientist: wonder what was in there

Me a chemist: Samples were not kept to standards.

Engineer: Light it on fire to see if it explodes.

[bananna-threads]

Behold! The Victorian couch I'm reupholstering.

I got a pair of these off of Buy Nothing and they were beautiful, but not in the best shape--the backrest foam had totally disintegrated, it smelled of cat urine, and the wood stain was chipped and scraped all over. Although I was a complete novice in furniture...restoration(?) I decided to try my hand at it anyway. Follow the tag [#bananna reupholsters] for updates!

[whatthefuckisasweep]

RVB NATION HOW THE FUCK ARE WE FEELING RIGHT NOW??!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?>!!<!?!?!>!>?!?!!?!?!?!?

[reasonsforhope]

“It’s not every day that a municipal waste department spends more time thinking about saving things than dumping them. In Hamburg in Germany, however, there’s money to be made in the second-hand market, and who better to capitalize on that than the people who haul the city’s trash?

Stilbruch is the “IKEA of used goods,” and every day, collections from private individuals—or from trash collectors on their routes—brings goods which will all get cleaned up, repaired, and re-sold to support a more circular economy in the country’s second-largest city.

Some 400,000 objects are processed through two giant cavernous warehouses every year; everything from well-worn teddy bears to refurbished laptops and kitchen counters.

Launched in 2001 as an initiative from the sanitation department, Stilbruch has gone from having one full-time employee to 70, and from being a largely non-profit orientation to bringing in €300,000 to €500,000 ($330,000 to $550,000) per year in profit.

“These things are useful. They really aren’t rubbish,” Roman Hottgenroth, operations manager at Stilbruch, told The Progress Network. “Used is the new sexy… We are trying to stop throwaway culture and wastefulness. There’s so much value in what we treat like trash.”

Stilbruch contracts technicians and craftsmen who ensure that all used furniture is given a thorough beautification, and all electronics can be sold with a 1-year warranty.

The warehouse is part of a wider EU movement to try and cut back on all waste streams, but especially home furnishings and electronics. Chief among these efforts is restoring the “right to repair,” to consumers, 70% of whom it’s thought would prefer to repair items than replace them.

Stilbruch has been heralded by EU and German legislatures and think-tanks as a pioneering model that could be replicated by most municipalities.

Even small towns which don’t have the populations required to fill up a warehouse like Stilbruch can manage weekly flea-markets.

As for the future? Hottgenroth is planning to open yet another warehouse, and even to furnish public buses with mini-libraries.”

-via Good News Network, 3/1/22

[sygneth]

guys i went to a furniture conservation super intense course and the amount of the cool things that did in the past three days is insane and we're not even half way through it, it was the best decision in years

I can make a historically appropriate drawer now

[sheafrotherdon]

The Unrecognizable Calculus of This

Part four of The Repair Shop AU

Joe/Nicky, 14,179 words, complete.

A humidor, a jigsaw puzzle, and a chair. A new home, an old colleague, and love.

(or, the one where Joe finally yells at Booker)

At AO3

[a-strawberry-mouse]

I have a conundrum and I crave opinions!

**Context below the poll.**

I've been looking for a wooden folding leaf table for a while. The plan was to get one, strip it, sand, and stain it with some variety of purple. Visible mending is my favorite for many things. Furniture included.

Imagine my outright glee when I found one for $40. And it came with a storage section for chairs with the original four chairs! A year of searching, now over with results.

I looked at the pictures enough to see that it needs cosmetic repair, but it's sturdy. Good bones. The accordion door sticks, but it does work. The varnish has seen better decades, etc.

The seller was fab. Told me about the previous owners(mom and dad) and it was lovely. I bought a couple of other things from the sale. Small stuff I keep forgetting to buy. Very nice experience.

The accordion door(kept up because I haven't found why it's acting up yet)

Original wheels!

The top has water damage.

The hinge has the center metal of the hinge about a cm out.

The leaves have water damage and some scraping.

Mouse damage(I'm innocent).

I look up, "Romanian drop leaf table," and this thing is most likely from the 60s! In better shape they sell for more than $1000. Obviously this one needs work, but I mean, for $40 this is amazing. Past amazing.

But.

Is it okay to alter an antique?

Can I still turn this purple, or is that disrespectful?

I know that no matter what I do someone will be upset. I also know someone has already called dibs on the table upon my death regardless of which direction I go(they're not kidding, but they did say it in a funny way).

With just how much damage it has and the fact that a lot of this is veneer; it seems like a total overhaul is necessary either way. I've been told to scrub the tabletop with a baking soda paste mixture and a toothbrush. I confess, I'm not sure I'm really ready to do that. That sounds like a terrible time.

Originally spray painting the table was an option. It still could be if I do just the top. It may genuinely be the best option for the table's longevity. Quick, thin, and there's a lot of options for color and seal strengths. Plus there's already something that will need paint in the kitchen(this table will be in the kitchen) so they could match.

[cornley-amateur-drama-society]

Chris, Sandra, Robert, and Vanessa as YouTubers

(because the idea was living in my neurons and firing them constantly)

Chris is so one of those guys who acts out his favourite scenes from plays and movies and TV shows.

But, more importantly,

He is watching stage performances and ripping into them with a zest that scares new viewers.

(There is a drinking game floating around with older viewers based on what Chris says or does, such as pinching the bridge of his nose at least three times in the span of two minutes or if he starts a sentence off like, “Hm, right, well then.”)

He's talking about Shakespeare, he's talking about Wilde, he's looking at off-Broadway and off-West End up-and-coming shows

He's looking at what's promising (u&c shows), what's timeless (older, well-known shows), and what he appreciates about them or what he thinks is outdated or sucked in execution (all).

Once a month, he'll perform a scene from a play he wrote himself.

There are several plays he's penned from which he chooses each month, performing scenes that are disjointed, so his ideas cannot be potentially stolen.

He does have a Patreon, the patrons dubbed “The Screen Beans.”

One of the things he does every other week is a live Q&A while he does mundane things like cleaning his office or making a meal or holds yarn for someone off-screen.

There are fancams in the #ScreenBeans tags across social media of his lives due to Chris' much more laid-back personality.

(Laid-back is a relative term here. He is still very conscious of what he says and does, however he wears his glasses or forgets to shave a few days before the lives or is wearing cosy-looking handmade jumpers.)

His Instagram account is active, and he posts at least thrice a week. Each post is something specific for the day, like #HoratioMondays, #WednesdayViewings, and #SaturdayShots.

Horatio is a beloved feature of his channel. A nearly completely black cat with white spots on the end of his tail, over one eye, and on one paw, the little guy is missing half of one of his ears. He has brilliant green eyes, though, that look like emeralds when the light hits him right.

Chris had, in his late-teens one night walking to his flat, stumbled across Horatio as a small, weak, and thin kitten. He instantly picked him up and took him back to his flat. Though there were two other roommates there, Chris was positive that they would be fine with it.

(This was in part due to having seen Kevin's family cat in the family pictures around the flat, and also knowing the Patels since he and Kev were in Primary. Their other roommate was a friend of a friend named Max Bennett, and he was surprisingly easy-going and adored animals.)

Horatio Mondays are of the now almost twelve-year-old cat going about his life.

Sometimes they're videos of him staring at a bug on the window or of him dropping one of his toys into his mini water fountain and then releasing the most pitiful and cooked yowl for Chris to rescue it.

Other times they're pictures of him curled up on the little bed Chris has for him in his office, slightly messy selfies of the two of them together, or pictures of Horatio dressed up for whatever holiday or event is approaching.

Wednesday Viewings are sneak peaks into what his video on Friday will be about. Sometimes it's a shot of the title card of the movie or TV show. Others it's an artfully done picture of a book of a play open with several pens and sticky notes scattered in and around it.

Saturday Shots are just pictures of anything particularly interesting Chris did during the week, or pictures and videos taken during a stroll in the park near his flat, or pictures with his friends at cafés or theatres.

Many people are surprised by who Chris is friends with, not expecting to see the Sandra Wilkinson, the Robert Grove, and the Vanessa Wilcock-Wynn-Carroway with him.

Well, okay, Sandra and Robert make sense given that both of them are well-known acting vloggers, too. But it always throws new viewers off to find out that Chris and Vanessa are engaged.

The two of them are very good at keeping their accounts separate and compartmentalized.

Once they announce their engagement on both of their channels, however, the divide they had slowly erodes away and Vanessa can be seen occasionally in his lives, sometimes even joining in for a few minutes. She also starts to feature more heavily on his Instagram page, along with her cat Othello.

(Screen Beans are shook to find out that Chris had been hiding an entire whole ass cat from them for years. Especially one as fluffy as Othello. When asked about it in a live Q&A that he did on Instagram after his engagement announcement video went up, he chalked the lack of Othello up to the fact that he can close his office door while he films. And that Othello likes to sleep most of the time on his and Vanessa's bed or hang out with her while she works on a new pattern or design or challenge.)

Chris posts his videos every Friday, and they range between three minutes long to over an hour and a half if he's dissecting a film/TV show/play.

[chapmanrestoration]

18th century Dutch Marquertry walnut chest of draws restoration

[rathenarts]

I get such a kick out of restoring old upholstered furniture because the teardown stage at the start of the process can get absolutely buck wild. Here's a chair I grabbed off the street the other day, after a friend told me it had been fly-tipped near to where they work. By the time I got to it, it had been out in the rain for at least several days, and I found myself looking at this absolutely wrecked starting point:

This top layer of fabric was nailed to the frame. Pulling the nails out disclosed another, slightly smaller layer of fabric similarly nailed down underneath, over a third layer of hessian underlay. So far, so typical of one of these jobs:

And then I started to strike gold. Pulled off the hessian, and underneath that was...

Some strange wadded-up fabric, filling the gaping dent in what was revealed to be a caved-in cane seat. I started picking the soaked padding out, only to discover:

A random piece of red cloth, a pair of hand-knit woolly socks, and someone's old knickers. I kid you not. Tragically all the fabric was so deteriorated that it was coming apart in my hands, which is a great shame as I'd have loved to keep these just as weird exhibits.

Underneath all that, finally, was some beautiful Viennese-weave rattan work that had been the original seat; but which, alas, was so far gone with damp and rot that it tore away like paper as soon as I touched it:

And under the rattan, held in place by a board screwed to the underside of the seat that turned out to be a piece of an old-fashioned tea chest or something like one, was some more hessian and... a chunk cut from what I would guess was maybe a WWII-era army-surplus blanket?

It's like several decades' worth of One Weird Trick To Upcycle Your Old Chairs!!! all in one bizarre archaeological sandwich. I love this shit. XD

[bananna-threads]

I finally made a bit of progress on the couch today! The back is now tufted, but has yet to be stapled down. One thing I learned is that apparently, the pleats are always meant to face down so that dust doesn't get trapped in the creases. Clever!

The back: I used the foam that was cored out of the button-holes and bobbypins to tie down the buttons. My hope was that the bobbypins would distribute the weight across the foam and keep the buttons from tearing through the backing fabric.

I'm mostly happy with how it looks, but I do think I should have made the distance between the buttons on the fabric a bit shorter. Maybe that would have fixed the wrinkles and made it look more taught. Oh well--I think this is pretty good for my first go at diamond tufting :P

One thing I am pretty proud of is the seam that I had to make in order for the fabric to be wide enough to fit the back. I had it follow the line where the pleat would go so you can't even see it now! My pattern piece:

The seam puckered a bit because the fabric was so tricky to maneuver being so thick and all. Didn't end up mattering in the end, though, once it was all pleated up.

[nottonyharrison]

Latest restoration project 💙

Stripped back to bare timber, backing covered in cute cotton gorillas I got on clearance at spotlght, refinished handles and replaced broken knobs, finished in home made beeswax and linseed oil wax - no laquers or stains to let the natural native timber be the star of the show.

[squigglysquidd]

I've started an antique restoration project. It'll be my second overall but my first since being diagnosed with so many ailments that are bound and determined to slow me down.

However! I will take my sweet time and go slow and steady to get this job done.

My first project was a four-person dining set and although I'm actually going to redo the upholstery on it later too, I really enjoy how it came out. Maybe I might share it?

This time, it's a two-piece china cabinet that was handmade when my mother was young.

These are probably (at least) 50 years old. She can't remember exactly but I hope that my changes will make her happy.

If anyone is interested, I may share pictures of the restoration and remodeling. :)

[theadaptableeducator]

The Old Wardrobe - A FOUND furniture transformation product

After

Before

This was salvaged from the garbage... it was wobbly, full of cobwebs and insect carcasses... it was in desperate need of reconditioning and lots of wood putty... the shellac that covered it was like tree sap: sticky and smelly... I cleaned it all with vinegar and javex, sanded all I could, then did a few runs with wood conditioner. Finally, paint and lots of furniture wax...