brothers from different mothers

The twins started as a pair of singles.

Thats kinda the way of it in this stuff.  You come across a single piece, buy it on spec, and fire it into the storage pit (here there be dragons...) while you figure out what it matches.  Sometimes it does match a piece we have and we build up a suite, or at least a pair of matched pieces.

Other times, we have to just accept that its and orphan.

Anyway, by good luck we managed to end up with the Twins.  One I know came from Avondale, but I don't remember where the other is from.  Jos did the upholstery for them ages back and we had a go at refinishing the frame of one with a satin polyurethane finish.  It looked ok!

Then - true to form - they sat around a while.  This gave us time to procrastinate.  Which is good, since that takes a lot of time.

Our recent flush of excitement brought them out again.  After all, they are nearly finished.  We decided to go with the full strip and furniture oil finish for the frames, so all the hard work of 'urethaning the one frame went west...

It was worth it though.  What do you reckon?

coffee anyone?

Do you like the coffee table in the pictures in the previous post? We do! We bought it off Trade Me and it looked like this... Actually, this image makes it look good - it had lots of paint spot and heat rings all over it, and was looking a bit tired.

A few hours later, it looks great! OK its no Otto Larsen - its a veneered chipboard top, but the sub-frame is solid mahogany-esque and the wicker insert is complete and tidy. Now all the heat rings and paint spots are gone, and the blonde streak shines through the newly oiled surface, its a great addition to the family.

Expect to see a lot of it in various poses with sale items this year!

gee, we've been lazy...

Its been a while. OK, ages.

We've used weather, family commitments, phases of the moon, global warming, anything to avoid the effort of finishing any of the (mumble too many mumble mumble) projects we have on the go.

But we met up with Dave (sculda) a few weeks back and got re-energised. He put us onto a supplier of paint-stripper that works oh-so-well! So we immediately started into it again. The outcome is the completion of Heidi, the hardback sofa.

Heidi came to us from west Auckland. No black t-shirt or ugg boots, but also not the best looking westie chick. Outrageous. We were fortunate.

Jos took ages to do the upholstery. It was a learning curve for sure. The fabric chosen came from modus100 on Trade Me. She sources some really cool stuff from around the place, and we bought a few metres of this stuff on spec.

So all the upholstery got done including new squabs, and then we stalled. It was only the arrival of the new paint stripper (sorry - not saying what that is!) that got us under way again.

OMG. Polystrippa, Coopers, and all the other products are just, well, bollocks compared to this stuff. Its quick, clean and leaves a great surface for us to refinish the timber.

Heidi loved it! We pulled her completely to pieces - the base frame down to components. Every piece was individually stripped, sanded, oiled and reassembled back to the base. The seat frame was not stripped since it as in excellent original condition.

So, anyway, here she is. Up on Trade Me in the next couple of days.