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, a child's chair. It's oak in a what we call mission style, probably from the early part of the 20th century. It's looked like it's been stored in a barn or 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 this seat. The chair seems tight, and it's basically just screwed together anyway, although I imagine there's some joints, some dowels or something in some of these joints. So let's clean it. I'm going to use a very mild solution of my favorite cleaner here, just like an eighth of a cup in almost a quart of water. I want 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 rag so I can see if anything's coming off on it, and now I'll try the back of these legs, see what happens there. I don't see a tremendous amount of like dirt and stuff coming off on the rag, but it certainly looks brighter when it's wet, which is good. And all the parts of the finish that are bumpy and alligator, they're still intact. It 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. It looks beautiful. I feel like I can that bumpiness, those dark bumps, which are an 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. Well, 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 marker, medium oak, and I think it's just the right color. All right, now I'll just 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 really rough. I think what I want to do is take some Watco Danish oil and some 600 black paper and wet sand it with the Watco. We'll experiment on this black leg. You can really see how pebbly it is here, all these dots of finish which have sort of crawled up together, and we'll just do a little experiment. This is Watco with walnut stain. It's walnut Watco. 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. 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 on 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-honored trade, and I have the greatest respect for all upholsters. My upholsterer 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 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 I just have to tack on. This is another artificial leather type product similar to what's on there, and I just need to tack it on. So I've scraped these areas here. There's just, you know, stuff in there. Now I'm going to wax it. 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 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 4-aught steel wool and this orange oil beeswax polish. All right, I'm going to let this 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.