One Room Challenge - Week Three - Porch

This is week three of the six week ORC (One Room Challenge) and so it is half over, and therefore I should be half done. I wish! You can start from the beginning by going to week one, and here for week two. So lets get to it!

My husband found this wicker chair that was in pitiful condition, but I adored the continuous curved back and arms of the chair and thought it had potential, so it was a keeper, and better yet I thought it would work great on my porch, but it needs some serious help. She has this dilapidated regalness with an attitude about her, as if she doesn't know how sad she is at the moment.

Literally someone had just discarded her. Well one's persons discards is another persons treasure, and a treasure she is, or will be. She had this plastic sort of seat. She had been left out in the rain, it was soaked all the way through.

My husband is helping me with this chair.  Beneath the top layer was a carved leather seat. It was all dried up and cracked and not the least bit salvageable. But it must have been beautiful once.

Also in the above picture, see that row of wicker around the edges of the leather, it too had to be torn off. The picture below shows what we were left with.

The cuts into the wood were ragged and uneven making me think that it was done by hand. The problem was now was getting a piece of wood to fit into these ragged cuts.

So some measuring was in order both for the depth of the seat and the width of the seat.

Because of the ragged edges the seat had to be cut again and again to get it closer to a snug fit. For the seat we used a 3/4" piece of  birch plywood that we already had.  He laid it on top of the seat and traced the shape from the underside of the chair.

He kept shaving it down just a little bit each time until it fit right inside.

So we have a seat! We also glued the seat around the edges and added a 1/4" fiberboard on the bottom to fill the 1" space of the actual depth of the seat. Now we need to do some sanding to the rough edges around the new seat to give it a smooth surface, and then we need to paint. You may have noticed some need in a few places for wicker repair, but I have no idea how to do that. If you have ever repaired wicker and have a tutorial on how to do that please comment below and direct me to your page.

Of course there is still much to do for my porch challenge.  I am thinking about paper lanterns and a painted drop cloth rug. Well I will leave something for next week to share with you. Thanks for following along.

There are many other bloggers participating in the ORC and you can go to Calling It Home to see all of the participants. See you next week.

Go Here For Week Four
Go Here For Week Five
Go Here For Week Six