Firewood Part Deux

After the freebies from last time, I also got a trunk-full of old lumber that my boss had set aside from the burn pile. The stock has a lot of useful pieces, such as thin pine backboards and drawer bottoms (which are useful for clock repairs), as well as several large pieces of lumber (armoire pieces?)

Initially I had no room for it anywhere, so it was piled in the front hallway (I didn't want it left in the cold porch).





The top board on this pile is actually a broken headboard from an old pine bed.



This second batch of firewood wasn't just boring wood planks. There were also a few fun pieces. Among them was this gorgeous gesso-decorated mirror frame. I was amazed that it was still in good shape, because I literally dug it out of the back of a pickup truck full of scrap wood. It was half buried, but it has almost no breaks. it will just need a few touch-ups. The frame has already been repaired with wooden dowels drilled diagonally and glued into the corners.

You can see it here in front of the previous mirror (which needs a lot more work), and 2 of my other old frames behind it. You can also make out the love seat on the right. The frame is pretty large at ~16" x 57". I'd date the frame to around 1900, but it has a similar style to earlier 1800's over-mantle mirrors. I plan to just touch up the frame, and install repro wavy mirrors.

Also note that large Victorian carved table leg on the floor. I have no idea what I'll do with it, but it's solid walnut, so sadly I may just use the lumber. Otherwise it's just a giant (and very random) decoration.



I also salvaged some interesting fretwork pieces. The large one is likely from a gramophone or radio cabinet, while the smaller one is from some sort of decorative wall shelf. The piece at the front is the top of an old mirror. It's ruined, but the pressed/carving can be removed and reused.



The desk has been brought upstairs into the "L Room" for storage until I can work on it.



The rest of this post is just a few random bits.

Here are two shots of the restored finish on the mahogany serving piece. I think it turned out awesome for so little work.



The colours are wonky in this one, but you can see the top better. It's not 100% perfect (since the top had a LOT of stains and blotches), but it's pretty good, and I prefer imperfections on antiques.



Lastly, here's a half finished project. I've started working on some of the grates. This one has been cleaned, scrubbed free of excess rust, and painted. The interior (and back sides) are flat black, and the front is gloss white. I used spray paint for a beautiful smooth finish. The screw was also cleaned-up with a metal file (to remove burrs and marks), and painted.



The reason it's only half finished is because the latch hasn't been stripped and painted, and neither has the interior flap. These will be worked on at the same time as I do the second one for the living room.

I also took advantage of this past week's sale on paint at the Home Depot. I spent over 200$ on 3 1/2 cans of paint. I bought green for the upstairs "L Room", and blue and light grey for the main hallway (it will be blue on the main floor, and grey going up the stairs).

Finished Antique Chair

The chair has been finished since Monday, but I wasn't able to properly photograph it until this afternoon.

There have been several past posts about the chair, and its progress, which I'll list below in order.

Monday, June 03, 2013 - Random Side Projects
Monday, June 03, 2013 - Tearing Off
Monday, June 10, 2013 - How I Got My New Job
Sunday, June 16, 2013 - A Few Random things
Saturday, July 13, 2013 - House/Project Updates
Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - Antique Chair Update
Thursday, September 12, 2013 - Antique Chair Update (Part 2)
Saturday, September 14, 2013 - Antique Chair Update (Part 3)
Saturday, September 21, 2013 - Random Update

If you're not planning to browse through the old posts showing the progress, I'm only going to include one "before" photo (again) here.

As a quick recap, the chair was a roadside trash find from 2 blocks away. I stripped it down, took the frame apart, reglued it with period correct hide glue, repaired the original shellac finish (to blend together the crackle), polished/buffed with dark wax, and finally I redid all the upholstery, which included:

- Install new webbing
- Attach springs
- 8-way hand tie the springs
- New burlap cover
- Black fabric "straw cover" (to help keep the straw dust contained in the chair seat)
- Re-fluff and pad down the original straw
- Re-install the original "felt padding", which we discovered is actually Kapok*
- New layer of soft cotton padding
- Layer of thin muslin fabric
- Top fabric
- Hot-glued decorative gimp cording
- hand tacked black bottom fabric

* Kapok is a fluffy seed-pod fiber from the kapok tree, which is a gigantic tropical tree. It is silky, cottony, and reminiscent of the fluff commonly found in milkweed pods. This was a common upholstery stuffing material for decades, but isn't used often today.

BEFORE!



AFTER!







As you can see, even though the popular vote was for the pink or dark raspberry gimp, I ended up choosing a very dark green (which wasn't shown). I'm very pleased with the finished chair.

Antique Chair Update

Hey folks! If you've been following along for a while, you may have noticed that I tend to jump around with what projects I'm working on. Just last week I finally decided to go ahead and order my fabric for the old mahogany chair I picked up (photo below). It's a fairly pricey fabric at 60$/yard, but as my boss Pierre said: "Don't cheap out on your fabric."

The fabric is really beautiful, and high quality, and it's even thicker than I had thought (from having seen the sample).

Last night, Pierre picked up the chair, and I worked on it after work today.

For those who need the refresher, this is the chair I had picked up on garbage night a few years ago just down the street. Starting to repair this chair also landed me my current upholstery job. You can read all about that, and see more "before" photos in this post. There are also two previous posts about this chair HERE and HERE.



The steps I did this evening were to do with the actual stuffing of the seat. These included redistributing a whole shopping bag full of the original "straw" stuffing, which I discovered this evening is actually wood shavings/strips (which is another type of stuffing material).

Pre-warning: none of these photos turned out very clearly. I cleaned them up and sharpened them as best as I could.

"Straw" (wood) stuffing:



Next was the original felt/cotton/hair padding (neither of us was 100% sure what this was, but I added it back into the stuffing as an extra layer).



Next (and not pictured, since I forgot) was a good layer of cotton. The stuffing at this point looked like a giant pile, but all of it compresses down quite a bit. The last part of the stuffing is a thin cotton muslin (fabric):



Trimmed and ready for the finish (top) fabric:



Lastly is a photo of the fabric. The photo is blurry, and it sucks, but the fabric is nice, thick, and it has a bit of texture to it (the black is slightly fuzzy, and the florals are tightly knit patterns.



I will probably finish the chair tomorrow after work, so stay tuned!

News! Tons of Neat New Stuff

Alright, lots of interesting and exciting things to discuss today! I have over 75 new photos to share!

Upholstery News:

First, I started a new blog for all the upholstery. There's just too many interesting and beautiful pieces that we've been working on, and I don't want to flood my "old house blog" with all the upholstery photos, so that's all being moved to the new blog "Lefebvre's Upholstery". That blog will be updated frequently with some of the better/bigger projects we're working on (we don't bother to post, or even photograph, the more mundane items like vinyl boat seats and chair repairs). I hope all of you who find upholstery to be fascinating, or who just love to see some rather dramatic "before and After" photos will enjoy following that blog. You can find it here:

Lefebvre's Upholstery Blog

I currently have 54 new upholstery photos that will be posted shortly, plus the reposts of the ones I already showed on this blog. If there isn't anything up on the blog yet, just be patient with me, and check back tomorrow.

Foursquare News:

I bought some furniture!

Well, that's a bit of an understatement since I walked away with 14 pieces of furniture, consisting of an entire matched 12 piece dining room set in mahogany, plus two freebies: a leather top (mahogany) coffee table, and an upholstered (beaten-up and falling apart) Eastlake style Victorian chair.

I saw the set advertised locally through Kijiji, and it only had 4 small photos, with a 500$ asking price. I could see one of the chairs poking out from the edge of a photo, and the table with 8 chairs seemed worth the asking price on their own. The set also came with a glass-door china hutch, a large sideboard, and another cabinet.

I contacted the seller (who was conveniently 2 blocks away on 4th street - note: I'm on 5th), and made plans to have a look at the set on Thursday night. I was very excited when I saw it, and that's when the owner also offered me the coffee table and Victorian chair "free if you want them". He also said he could deliver it (SWEET!!!)

I wanted to post about it on Thursday night or Friday, but I didn't want to jinx anything and I waited until today.

I spent all morning and part of Friday cleaning up all the clutter and junk around the house and in the garage to make the place look half decent, and to clear some room. This morning I moved my old chairs to the basement, and dismantled the crappy old table I had.

Dining Room ready for the new arrivals!



The chairs (before taking them inside from the garage):



Ta-Dah!



Hutch:



I started to really look over the set, and I noticed quite a few nice details. One of the signs of a high-end set is that the back legs on the larger pieces (sideboard, hutch, etc) are carved/turned. Many of the more basic sets usually have plain back legs.

Next, the drawers. Wow. Not only are they well made, but this is the first time I've seen internal drawers that are made with 1/4 sawn White Oak. For those who don't know, quarter sawn lumber is when the wood is cut radially through the tree (think pie wedges). This means that the grain running through the board is running perpendicular to the board (stripes as opposed to curved lines when you look at the end of a board). This causes a lot of waste, but the wood is more stable, less likely to warp, and it's also the only way to see those beautiful "tiger stripes" that are present in all pieces of Oak. Regular "flat sawn" wood will have shallow curves in the wood grain, and they're more likely to cup/warp, but it's much cheaper and easier to do. Almost all the solid wood furniture you'll see today is flat sawn.



Then there's the dovetails. Most people know that dovetails are good, and a lot of older stuff will have them (machine cut or hand cut are equally good). These drawers not only have dovetails at the front...



But also at the back! This is something that you will RARELY see. NONE of my other antiques have this with the exception of my little mahogany night stand (which has just one drawer).



When I had first seen the set I thought it was all Walnut (which is very typical for this style of 1920s set) but when I looked at it in the light, I could see that it's mahogany. All of the legs and mouldings are solid mahogany, and the sides/tops are mahogany veneer.



With all these signs of quality, I was incredibly surprised to find that there were absolutely NO markings on the pieces except for pencilled numbers. Some of the chairs are numbered "9310" and the smaller cabinet is numbered "9312".



From what I can tell, it says "9312 Bottom" "Nov 5 1945" "RossKerr" and something along the lines of: "Like is nany Chuck" (?) These were the only markings I could find.





I had thought that the pink and gold-green fabric on the seats was original, but one of the torn ones proved otherwise.

The fabric is actually dark pinkish red, with the green added afterwards. In some of the excessively worn-out places, the bright pink shows through a lot. The green stripes almost look like ribbons. It's quite an interesting/nice fabric and it goes well with the set.





Here's that other piece. I don't have room for this one, so it will be used in another room.



Now, my final thoughts on the set: It's kind of big. I was surprised how much space the table takes up with the chairs. I will have to rearrange the pieces, because currently the sideboard is so deep on that side that I can't even open a drawer half way, or pull-out a chair properly. The table is off-centre from the room by 4" (because the window and light fixture are 4" off) so it might work better on the opposite side (since I'll gain that 4"). Worst case scenario is that I have to "get rid of" (move to another room) the sideboard. I don't really understand why it's so deep in the first place. It's about 21" deep, while the hutch is only 17" deep.

Then there's the freebies. The chair has definitely seen better days.

The fabrics don't even match, and the upholstery job on the seat is just terrible. Look at all the creases and bunching on the right corner, and on the back left side.







Pierre tells me that the greenish gold velvet isn't original because it's textured velvet.



Note the crack in the stretcher below. The whole chair is rickety and falling apart. The finish isn't the best either, but it has potential to be really nice. The casters have brass wheels.



The coffee table. This one I'm not too fussy about, but I love the cute little casters with the square tips. The table looks like solid mahogany (no veneers), and the top might be leather. It looks and feels like it's fake, but there's a deep gouge in it at one end, and it seems fuzzy, so it could be real leather.

Note broken corner moulding.



The finish on it is in horrible shape (both the wood, and the thick varnish coating over the leather).



That's it for now, but I also had some houses/buildings I'll be posting soon.

A Great Find!

Look what I scored off Kijiji*! I usually just quickly browse the adds every so often, and I spotted this great little mahogany table for only 15$!

It had a few deep chips to the finish on the top, and some light scratches to the legs, but I fixed those in just a few minutes with coloured wax (for the chips) and a touch-up marker (legs). Otherwise it's in absolutely perfect shape. It's not a true antique piece from the 1800's, but it's a very well made reproduction, probably from the early 1900s (maybe 1930s?) The top is a veneer/plywood, but you can't tell unless you really know what to look for. The legs and pedestal are very well made, with no cracks or loose joints. I think they refer to these as a "snake foot". The varnish (which looks like very thick shellac) is all crackled but I like it this way.

Overall, an absolutely amazing little table (19" x 29" and 18" high) for only 15$. I'll use it as an end table in the living room. The best part: it was literally just one block away from my house (it was on 6th street and I'm on 5th street).







I was really excited to post it, since I picked it up just last night, but the lighting was bad and I wanted decent photos of it.

* Kijiji is a classifieds website. It's just like Craigslist, but no one in Cornwall uses Craigslist. I often browse for antiques, tools, or home reno materials.

Random Side Projects

As some of you might know, I'm a clockmaker, but the house has pretty much taken up all my spare time and energy. For several months, I've had a longcase clock that I started working on for a client (the parents of a friend), and I've been lazy/side tracked. For two months I've done *no work* on it, which is pretty lame of me. I decided to get back to it today.

Since I'll be working with animal hide glue for a lot of the longcase clock's repairs, I also decided that I would simultaneously work on 2 (3, 4, 5?) other side projects that require hide glue repairs. The first of these is this antique chair (see below). The second is yet another chair (I'll share photos tomorrow). 3 is a very quick repair to the mirror stand from my antique walnut bedroom set (already done), and 4 & 5 will be to fix 2 clock tops that were damaged in the move back in 2010.

This chair is actually a trash find (which means it was free!) I was walking home one evening on garbage night (or possibly the evening before), and this chair caught my eye, so I took it home. It wasn't too heavy, and luckily it was only 2 blocks away.



The chair is mahogany with its original crackled shellac finish. The old upholstery was in TERRIBLE shape, but overall, I thought it could make a nice piece once restored. The shape is also a bit unusual. I can't say that I've ever seen another one with this type of shape on the back rest.

When I brought it home and had a good look at it, I noticed that it was actually stuffed with STRAW! It was also apparent that the last person to upholster it didn't do the best job, and had several "make do" pieces, like the sewn scraps of fabric for the webbing (shakes head).



They just don't make furniture like this these days. Not a single piece of wood on this chair is flat. Every single piece has curves and bends, and precisely cut angles and joints. Also notice the nice edge ribbon detail.



Here are the scrap fabric webbing pieces (which failed). They are sewn with a sewing machine, but the repairs and upholstery job look VERY old (I'd say early 1900s).



I spent about a good hour this afternoon tearing off all the old fabric, ripping out hundreds of tiny little upholstery tacks, and dealing with all the old straw stuffing. It was kind of a mess.

I also knocked-apart the chair and later in the evening I glued it all back together again while I did one or two small glue jobs on the clock case pieces. More photos tomorrow. I'll also share a detailed photo of the original (or second upholstery job) fabric, ribbon, and the other chair. Both these old chairs will likely be used in the living room.