Ugly chair make-over

I can't seem to find the pictures of this chair originally, back when we bought it from a local thrift store this spring. That is not necessarily a bad thing! It was pretty ugly back then.

First we replaced the ugly periwinkle and stained chair pad with a crisp, sleek black one. This was a great first step, but it was clear it needed to be refinished, too.

Refinishing was difficult. We realized when we found the chair that the chair and ottoman were slightly different colors. It turns out one is Beech and one is Birch. What you might not know until you've spent a few afternoons on the hot patio with the stain out is that Beech and Birch take stain very differently! I ended up having to sand off and redo much of the stain in order to get the colors close.

You can hardly tell unless you look really closely. And at the end of the day, close enough was good enough for me!