Rejuvenated Vintage Chairs

These chairs have belonged to my wife for longer than I can remember.  They originally sat on her grandmother’s expansive porch at her large home in midtown Memphis.  Sometime after her grandmother passed away and when possessions were being divided up, she requested and received them, although they looked much better then.

At our current home, rather than being protected on a covered porch, they have always sat out in the backyard.

As a result, they have been continuously exposed to the elements and as such, have aged rather poorly. At one point, my wife tried to remove the rust with a steel brush and then repaint them.  But she was never fully satisfied with the way they looked.

Then this year, my wife learned about a process to refinish metal called powder coating.

If you want to learn the details of what powder coating is (I had never heard of it before), you can Google powder coating and get a very technical description of the process.  But basically, it is not paint.  It is a mixture of dry pigments, polymer resins, curative agents, and several other ingredients.  This blend is then ground into a fine powder and then sprayed onto the target metal with a spray gun using electrostatic spray deposition (sorry that may have been even more than you wanted to know).

But one more detail; in the case of metal that is in very poor condition (such as our chairs), they first sandblast it to remove rust and old paint rendering a very smooth finish.

So, one day early in May, we loaded them up in the back of my wife’s car and drove over to the powder coating business.  She took the “Before” pictures at the beginning of this post once we arrived there. Once inside, I helped her select a color from the rainbow of possible options available.  We were then told there was an eight-week backlog (obviously this is a popular process).  I said, great, we’ll get them just in time for a 4^th of July party.

Due to multiple out of town trips and out of town company, we missed picking them up for that party. One day when my wife was busy, I drove over to pick them up.  When they brought them out, I could not believe how great they looked.  And when I went inside to pay, I could not believe that they only cost $50 each (I figured with all the labor involved it would be several hundred dollars).  I brought them home and placed them in our garage until my wife could see them.

When she saw them, she too thought they looked great!

The chair on the right you will notice has no armrests.  The wooden ones previously there had rotted off years ago.  When we had taken the chairs in, we asked if they could add armrests.  We were told no, that they did not provide that service, but she could give us the name of a custom woodworker (I heard expensive!).  As my wife gazed at the chairs, I told her I could add painted white armrests myself.  She and I then had the exact same thought—we wished we had thought to tell them to paint the metal armrests on the chair on the left white.  I then said while I was at it, I could paint those white also.

The day my wife went out of town on a business trip, I decided to get started.  I had previously bought a 2-foot long 1.5” X 0.5” piece of poplar.  The first step was to sand it smooth and round the edges.  I rough sanded with my palm sander and then smooth sanded with my modeler 800-grit finger sander (thanks again Sis for telling me about these).

I then measured the halfway point and used my circular saw to yield two 1-foot sections.

I then clamped them in place to determine where the holes should be drilled from beneath.

A little more sanding to smooth out the ends and then screwed them in place.

Not too bad for an amateur.  I then removed them along with the metal arm rests on the other chair and spray painted them.  It took five separate spray sessions over two days to adequately cover first the top and then the bottom of all four armrests.  When I was finished painting, I was most pleased.

I installed the metal armrests on the first chair…

… and then the new wooden armrests on the second chair.

I thought they both looked great.

When my wife got home from her trip, they were still sitting in the garage for her to see.  She immediately thought they looked great but later that night, she admitted to me that the wooden armrests did not look like how she remembered them.  We’d had the chairs for over 25 years, and I could not even remember the one chair ever having armrests.  But she would have, no doubt, had some fond childhood memories of rocking in them on her grandmother’s porch and my wife has an incredible memory, so I figured she was right.

She then looked for the chair online to see some images and made some interesting discoveries.  First the chair was what is called a vintage Lloyd Metal Chair.  Second, there was a Facebook Group for the chair with over 10,000 members with some of the chairs selling for almost $1,000.  And third, she found an image of how the armrests looked that she remembered.

She then recalled a picture she had of her grandmother standing on the porch and she thought the chair was in the background.  I went to look at it.  Wouldn’t you know it, she was right!  With wooden armrests to boot!

I volunteered to make new armrests that modeled the original since it would necessitate me to buy a router (I’m always looking for a project excuse to buy a new power tool) but she said no, she would contact the custom woodworker to get a price (remember I thought expensive).  This time I was right.  The quoted price for the two armrests was $250—five time what we paid to have the chair powder coated!

Thwarted, my wife decided she would just live with no armrests on that chair.

We still did not have a covered porch where the nicely redone chairs would be protected from the weather.  Over the years as our flowerbeds expanded, and our yard shrank, the chairs had been moved into a flower bed behind a large Burning Bush.  I thought I could at least build a pad so they would not have to sit in mulch.

I laid down some pavers in that flower bed…

…and my wife and I moved the chairs there.

Now my wife has a nice spot where she can relax sitting in her rejuvenated vintage chairs in what she calls her “Secret Garden.”