RESTORING HISTORY - Bringing a 120-Year-Old- ANTIQUE Chair Back to Life

Hi everyone and welcome to the latest video. I am going to be working on this Edwardian dining chair for a customer of mine. I've previously done some work for them. I've done a sewing table and the celebration bowl which I've done videos on. So if you haven't seen those I'll leave links in the description. This dates to round about well in between 1901-1910 and has some beautiful features. Some wooden inlay and some spade feet legs. It's in a quite a bad way and the customers asked me to do a full restoration on this so stay tuned. I hope you enjoy the process and I think you'll be surprised at the results at the end. Thanks for watching. As you can see this upholstery has definitely seen better days and it needed to come off. There's no question about saving this original upholstery and the customer wanted a different look for the chair anyway. So all I'm doing there is I am making a an incision, a surgical incision, into the upholstery just to rip that off and that'll allow me to get to the wadding underneath, clear that away and that will give me access to all the little upholstery tacks that are holding everything in place. This upholstery is a little bit different than some of the previous chairs that I've done in that the upholstery, the webbing, the the stuffing and the finished material it's all attached directly to the chair frame. Most of the other chairs that I've done have had a removable seat pad that was separately upholstered so there was no fixings directly to the frame of the chair. All the upholstery was done on the seat pad itself. As you can see there the seat webbing was really really worn and just totally lost its tension so that was going to be replaced and this is me trying to remove all these rusty horrible furniture tacks. Everything was held on with these, everything was rusted in and some needed a little bit of gentle persuasion to come out. You could see how easy those joints simply pulled apart and that just aged. That's the glue drying out in those joints and it makes it easier for me to take it to bits. All I'm doing there is marking each piece as I go just to make sure that when I put all this back together after it's been repaired and stripped etc that they all go back in the right place. Fortunately the back joints of the chair were all really tight and didn't need re-gluing. The seat itself was also screwed in behind these little dowels they didn't need any work at all so all good. Big thanks to Jay at Flipping Draws. Jay very very kindly sent me this on my birthday from my wish list so first time I'm going to use it I'm going to use it to clean up some of the old glue off the joints so let's give it a go. If you haven't seen Jay's channel which is Flipping Draws then I'm sure you'll love it it does some brilliant work and if you like mine I've no doubt you'll like his so head over there once you've watched my video obviously. Thanks Jay! This is the stretcher that was completely snapped and as you can see there there's a bit of sellotape which I'm guessing was a temporary repair so all I need to do is is make sure I don't overwork the part that's broken just remove the finish from around that just so it sits together properly when I do the repair. This I think is solid mahogany whereas these stretchers for the bottom I don't think they are. They look like they've been stained or dyed. I'm looking at the grain they might be birch something like that or elm. Definitely a lighter wood than that but anyway let's crack on. These are referred to as square tapered legs with a spade foot and are popular in Edwardian furniture and gives an indication of the age of the piece so I've removed most of the finish and obviously because this is a shaped edge rather than going at it with the big sander I'm just removing most of the finish with a scotch-brite wheel and finishing it off by hand and then it's on to simply removing the finish from the chair and knocking down some of those holes from previous tacks. Wait a minute what have you got on your face? Dirty face. Do you want this? Ready steady go. Good catch Daisy. Can I say hello? Come here. Good girl. Right, are you ready? Ready steady go. Good cat. Okay see you later. There actually weren't too many repairs to do on this piece of furniture other than re-gluing the joints but they're not really repairs. This had snapped off totally so just a case of using some strong wood glue and trying to get a clamp on it which was a bit of a pain but it seemed to work okay and it was pretty solid. Before I apply the glue to the piece as I'm reassembling it I tend to like to do a dry fit just to make sure everything goes back where it should and then I'm happy to take it apart again and start the gluing process. Because this is an antique chair I've decided to use a more traditional glue. This is a hide glue and I'm using this to re-glue all the joints and it's just a lot easier if this needs to be taken apart in the future and this type of glue would have been used when this chair was originally made. That's the clamps I have to use for this one chair. Bits of glue. I just need to clean those up now. Give it a once over. You might be wondering why I'm using a mahogany stain on a solid mahogany piece of furniture and the reason for this is I mentioned earlier the stretchers, the sort of the dowel shaped stretchers aren't the same wood and I wanted it to all look you know fairly similar so I've used this brown mahogany because I also wanted to try and reduce the amount of redness but not not do away with it but just sort of tone down the redness a little bit so the brown mahogany works really well. I'm using a clear acrylic satin lacquer for the top coat and this just gives it a really nice sheen and gives it some really good protection as well so multiple coats. First coat quite light and then wipe it down with the old brown paper bag just to knock off any dust nibs and then on with the second coat and then I think this had four coats in total so yeah this this should be protected for many years to come. The next step of the process is to reupholster it with some lovely new upholstery materials and while I'm doing that I'd just like to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to everybody that supports the channel whether that's through the buy me a coffee link, my Amazon wish list, the super thanks buttons and generally for anyone who has liked and commented on my videos I really appreciate it and I hope you carry on enjoying the content that I put on. Thanks very much. I've made a bit of an error here. It doesn't really matter but the Hessian sheet, I don't know why I've done it this way, these should have been on first and then that should be on the top but all it means is you just can't see the straps on the bottom so it looks nice. So it doesn't really need anything on the top now other than the filling so that's what I'm gonna do. That's what was on before. I'm sure my loyal subscribers will know that I've used this material before on other jobs and the reason for that is that the customers when I show it to them absolutely love it. It's a beautiful fabric and really good quality and it goes very very well with this style of furniture this period of design so yeah that's why I've used this. There's the material put on there and it's just a case of finishing it off now and hiding some of those staples using some trim and a hot glue gun. This is it. I hope you've enjoyed the video. I really really would appreciate if you could give it a thumbs up if you do like it and if you haven't subscribed please consider subscribing for more content like this and I'll leave you for these final few seconds and then the final reveal. Thanks for watching.