#restoring furniture

[lostintime-liketearsinrain]

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.

[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

[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!

[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

[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

[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.

[shiftythrifting]

A hideously amazing set of couches that my mom said is probably from the 70s. Spotted at Restore in Cromwell, ct

[dykedragons]

all i want is to have a bed in a nook. like 3 sides around the bed are all walls except for the foot of the bed. put a curtain by the foot of the bed. nook. a cave, even. with fairy lights and posters. a little shelf. wistful sigh

[pociondeodio]

haven't been on here much bc i'm constantly on my new favorite social media space (facebook marketplace)

[nerkierantsagain]

I am attempting to refinish/restain a dresser I bought at the thrift store. It is that ugly ass yellow wood but whatever is coating the drawer faces is made out of like liquid steel or something. Ive used a stripping agent THRICE to try and get the varnish or poly coat off and it WONT BUDGE. FRUSTRATION CENTRAL

Also the hardware guy convinced me to buy a walnut stain instead of an ebony and I HATED IT so I ended up going back for the ebony stain today. I know what I want and I am going to get what I want, and that is a dark stained dresser to fit the vibe of the room.

Pics of the dresser "before". I took out all the drawers before I remembered I wanted a before picture.

Most of the poly coat has been painstakingly scraped off from the drawer faces. (Took 6 fucking hours)

Tomorrow is sanding and HOPEFULLY staining the drawers. The day after will probably be stripping the body of the dresser and then sanding and staining it. Debating on whether I want to stain the sides of the drawers or just the faces

[englishbunnyrocks]

making pottery, restoring old furnitures, repairing watches, creating bouquets of flowers, making jewelry... dream jobs