Before & After: The Orale Louis Chair

Remember this old chair? I paid $5 for it at a garage sale down the street. When the lady told me the price, my eyes went all Jeckyll and Hyde fiendish, and I snatched it up. It's hard to run down the street with a chair while you're hunched over and drooling and grunting and your husband is waiting in the car for you and rolling his eyes. But you guys know what it's like. It's like Reefer Madness only with home decor. One woman's trash is another woman's crack. (That should be a poster on pinterest). So after many months of Jon's asking "what are you going to do with that chair?" and my answering "what can't I do with that chair?" to deflect from my total lack of plan of what to do with the chair, I actually did something with it.

I recovered it with a Mexican dress! And, no, it was not easy. See that part of the old velvet upholstery that hangs over the front? When I pulled that off, the wood underneath was clearly never intended to see the light of day. It was a wreck. Cheap wood. Rough. Unpainted. Glops of stain so thick it looked like tar. Eleventy billion nail holes. And as you can guess from the before pic, there was nothing salvageable under that fabric. In fact, everything not made of wood had completely disintegrated into toxic orange powder. I had to wear a hazmat suit to strip that thing down. But it all worked out pretty well, I think. And now I have a really pretty Mexican dress Louis chair. Orale!