Trash-picked Tuesday: Take a seat!

This is kind of a before-and-after Trash-picked Tuesday project that I've been meaning to get up for the last several weeks. I had these two dinette chairs in our barn left from the previous owners. They had great bones but had obviously seen better days. As you may recall, I already have a 1950s dinette set with four chairs, so they stayed out there until I had a use for them. Now with Tom moving into his own place and needing some furniture, I decided I would try and clean them up a bit to take over to his house. (I'm tired of eating pizza around an old cardboard box while sitting on top of 5-gal buckets when we're over there working.) Besides, they match a dinette table he already has- courtesy of our cousin ;)

The seats were ripped and mice had gotten into the padding, so I removed that. If he wants to spend the time and money on replacement cracked-ice vinyl, I'll replace them eventually.  For now, we'll just use tie-on chair pads. I scrubbed the chairs with Comet and let them dry.

The chrome has really gotten rusty and pitted over the years, particularly where the back meets the seat. I spent several hours with steel wool and Nu-finish on the legs to get them to the point where the remaining chrome was shiny. Some places were completely worn away to the bare metal and nothing short of re-plating is going to help.

This is the end result- you can see the neat turquoise trim- too bad I didn't come across these 20 years ago or they could have been much nicer! But I think they came out pretty well for something that had been left for trash.