New look chairs

There are times when I succumb too easily to the 'attractions' of daytime viewing on BBC1. I make no excuses for the fact that sometimes, especially if the weather is bad, and let's face it, we'd have difficulty remembering when it was good over the past several months, I waste the time I should be spending on dog walking, Welsh learning etc and instead, take the easy road, the path of 'Homes under the Hammer', 'Doctors' or, my latest addiction, 'Money for Nothing.' (In my defence, I do also watch BBC2's 'The Daily Politics Show', with the delightfully acerbic Andrew Neil and Jo Coburn.)

'Money for Nothing' is about three presenters who descend on recycling centres, persuade people to surrender their rubbish and then take it to various colleagues who are in the business of transforming these offerings into wildly different objects, which are then sold to unsuspecting customers for exorbitant amounts of money. (I often wonder if some people should actually be trusted with money, when they can be parted from it so easily!)

Don't get me wrong, sometimes the transformations are skilled and imaginative, usually when the object is not to make a coat rack out of an armchair, for example.  One of the programmes recently, showed a pair of seventies dining chairs (think Ercol or Schreiber) which were sanded down and given new seat pads. I thought they looked marvellous and immediately decided that was what our equally seventies dining table and chairs also needed. Sand them down, get rid of that seventies orange hue and, hey presto, a new dining set!

This is where I ran into my first obstacle - Keith. Not literally, you understand, but verbally. Not a good idea, he said, as the top of the table is veneer and sanding that down would be very tricky as it would be all too easy to inadvertently sand a hole in it and ruin the effect totally. I could do the chairs, but then they would look too different from the table. Further investigation into going down the white chalk paint route, which I think would have looked great, met with an equally unenthusiastic response.

So, in the interests of domestic harmony, I limited myself to re-upholstering the chairs and now, they look like this: