Restoring a Mission Chair - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

i'm tom johnson thomas johnson antique furniture restoration in gorham maine this is a nice little chair child's chair it's oak in a what we call a mission style probably from the early part of the 20th century it looks like it's been stored in a barn or a basement for some time it's all original but it is kind of dirty and rough the seat is this little upholstered slip seat and that material we need to recover it on the bottom of the seat is the manufacturing company goshen manufacturing but when i found their catalogs online all i saw was their outdoor equipment and stuff i didn't see any interior furniture like this but they do make lots of outdoor equipment for children so what i want to do is clean it up see if i can make it look a lot better revive the original finish and recover the seat the chair seems tight and it has basically just screwed together anyway although i imagine there's some joint some dowels or something in some of these joints so let's clean it i'm going to use a very a very mild solution of my favorite cleaner here just like an eighth of a cup in uh almost a quart of water i'm going to try it out a little on a place that doesn't show much like right under the seat here it's funny it appears to be finished it certainly doesn't seem to be hurting the finish it brightened it up quite a bit i'm going to switch to a white rack so i can see if anything's coming off on it and now i'll try to back these legs see what happens there i don't see a tremendous amount of like dirt and stuff coming off on the rack but it certainly looks brighter when it's wet which is good and all the parts of the finish that have that are bumpy and alligator they're still intact it didn't do any didn't affect that in any way and that's probably good right now i want to try scrubbing it with a gray scotch-brite pad just a little bit well it looks uh beautiful i feel like i can proceed now and clean the entire chair [Music] at first i thought this was just my imagination but some of that funkiness that those dark bumps which are alligator finish they seem to be getting a little bit better as i scrub which might be my imagination we'll see so when it's wet it has a really good color i'm going to let it dry overnight and then tomorrow we'll fool around with it some more a fair amount of dirt came off that chair wow the chair looks great just clean looks really good one thing i noticed yesterday though before i go to the next step a lot of these sharp corners have worn and they're kind of splintery so i need to smooth those with a little bit of 220 and stain them i don't want to like completely round them over but i don't want to feel the sharp edges like i'm getting ready to get a splinter now i'll go over those corners with a a marker of medium oak and i think it's just the right color so so all right now i'll just uh let this sit for a little while well the chair just keeps looking better and better it looks great but i still have the problem of roughness it feels rough it's those little pebbly type bits of finish that have crawled up some areas are are really rough i think what i want to do is take some watko danish oil and some 600 black paper and uh wet sand it with the watko we'll experiment on this black leg you can really see how pebbly it is here all these dots of finish which have uh sort of crawled up together and we'll just do a little experiment this is whatco with uh walnut stainless walnut watko i don't expect all those little dots of the rough finish to go away i just want it to feel better definitely feels better it's not you know 100 smooth but a lot better and this may be the worst part this leg here i think i'll do the whole chair you can even hear the roughness going away so we'll let this dry overnight and when you're using oil finish like this everything i've used the sandpaper the rags this cup everything goes outside i'll just spread it out in the ground and let it dry and then put it in a trash can outside you definitely need to get all this stuff out of your house or your shop okay now we can turn our attention towards the seat you know upholstery is a fine time-warner trade and i have the greatest respect for all the pollsters my pollster said for me to do this myself so i apologize to the upholsterers out there i'm going to give it a shot my idea is to preserve the original upholstery just as a record of if anyone ever wants to know what it was i'm going to cover this with a piece of this thin foam and then really tack on this is a another artificial leather type product similar to what's on there and uh i just need to tack it on [Music] [Music] [Music] so i've scraped these areas here there's just you know stuff in there now i'm going to wax it just i know the seat's going to be tight yeah it's tight but it's fitting fine good good okay great it's taken a a few days for that oil to completely dry it's just been super humid lately that's why i did the seat first and now i'm just going to go over the entire chair with a four out steel wool and this orange oil beeswax polish so all right i'm going to let this uh dry and after lunch i'll buff it down then i've got to go over some of these corners again with the marker there you go nice little mission oak chair you know there's something about children's furniture and miniature furniture that people find very appealing and of course this chair was not in terrible shape it was just kind of sad looking it was dirty and worn and we re-oiled it smoothed it out with wax it feels great new fabric for the seat i think it looks pretty good you

Channel: Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

Views: 82,942

Keywords: Thomas, Johnson, Antique, Furniture, Restoration, Gorham, Maine, Southern, ME, Greater, Portland, Boston, MA, Newton, Mass

Id: eyYhU8ivdyI

Length: 13min 33sec (813 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020