New chair for Cal

Cal spends a lot of time in his bedroom drawing, playing his keyboard, and just hanging out. He had one of our old kitchen chairs to use for his desk and keyboard, but it was kind of heavy and didn't fit into the leg hole space in his desk well. He was in the market for a new chair.

I found a chair down on Queen West for $6, and loved the shape and detail of the back of it. It wasn't very attractive when I brought it home - I think that Alan thought that I'd lost my mind. Or perhaps he's just tired of me dragging home random chairs. 

Anyway, I had this really ugly chair hanging around on my front porch for months before I got around to refinishing it. It was painted a flat mauve, with chips showing the puce green it was painted previously. And the seat had all kinds of paint splotches on it.

I'm not sure if they were done on purpose, or if the person who painted it was just too lazy to take the seat off. Which is saying a lot in the laziness department because the seat wasn't even screwed on, it was held on with little hooks that you just pulled free from the chair frame. No screwdriver required.

It took me forever to strip the stupid thing back to bare wood. While the trellis pattern back looks nice, it has a million small crevices to scrape the paint out of. My initial plans were to stain the wood the same dark walnut finish of Cal's bed. I almost threw in the towel several times in favour of spraying it black as it would have been so much easier.

I stuck it out, though, and after a lot of stripping and sanded I ended up here.

Two coats of walnut stain and satin varathane, and I was very happy that I hadn't given up and resorted to paint.

I picked up some bright microfiber to cover the seat as it's nice and easy to clean. Our old living room furniture was covered in microfiber and it's amazing the stuff that wiped off, including food, marker, ink and assorted bodily fluids from babies and small children. It also repelled dog hair.

I bought enough fabric to make a coordinating cover for Tessa's bed. She sleeps in Cal's room at night, and the poor thing has the ugliest brown cover on her bed. Plus it's kind of an awkward size and takes up too much space in the room. We have a smaller rectangular one downstairs that she sleeps on, so I'll make her one the same size for up here. The cover of this one unzips, so I can just use the inside of this bed in the new cover.

I'm also in the process of changing Cal's curtains into a roman shade so that his room is very dark. Now that the sun is up so early, Tessa is also up tap dancing along the hardwood floors. The early morning wake-ups are killing us!