Refurbished Bankers Chair

Oookay the chair .... is .... done.  Almost. I still have to put the the sealer on it and add a couple of screws but for aesthetic (i.e. pretty white purposes) it is done.  It took a lot longer than expected because as usual, yours truly plowed ahead before doing adequate research because I was too excited.  Lesson learned? Probably never.

So we're going to pretend the part where I impulsively spray painted the chair white, which resulted in a permanently sticky texture and me having to strip it (see photo below) and start over, never happened.  

After spray painting ... and subsequent stripping
There is no way to get around not priming.  It's true.  If you have any sense you will buy this oil based primer (oil based sticks to everything known to mankind), and you will buy the odorless kind if you are an apartment/big city dweller.
Quick tip: Sand any blobs or drips after priming, just gentle sanding to even it out, trust me it makes a big difference. How do I know? Because I skipped this step and now I regret it. 

Basically I took the chair apart as much as I could, sanded that puppy down, primed it, and painted it with a latex paint. This blog: centsational girl became my bible and I followed it (almost) exactly.  I also cleaned all the metal bits, for lack of a better word, because they were disgusting, see? 

And then I made them pretty 


Please take care to note the extremely professional aluminium lasagna pan, (unused and left over from Thanksgiving), and computer paper with flawed grad student assignments on them, as drop cloths. 

A reminder of the before ...

After ...







There you have it, my finished chair, how far it has come.  On to the next ... xo





4 comments:

  1. I'm repairing quite the same chair.
    I don't get to understand what is that mechanism for...
    what is it suppose to do?
    thanks
    gab

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hi Gab,

    The mechanism gives the chair structure, holds it together, and gives it some office chair features. The particular mechanism on my chair allows the chair to tilt back, to swivel, and to change the height of the chair. Make sure to note how the mechanism attaches to the chair and how all its pieces fit together before taking it apart to oil and paint it!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Beth, I have a chair like yours with the same spring mechanism, I was wondering if you knew which way to turn the knob in order to make the chair tilt back a little?

    ReplyDelete