trees, chairs and other stuff

Fall Colors-

The warm fall weather has done some interesting things around here.
Most of the trees still have all their leaves, and although it was reported that the fall colors wouldn’t be that great, some of our trees have shown better than ever.
Our one silver maple is a really gorgeous gold color.
My Sweet gum that I bought at Home Depot several years ago when it was mostly dead finally started to put on a show of really deep red colors. When I bought it was in horrible shape, but was billed as giving good fall color. I think it just took about 5 years for it to recover for such a crappy start in life.

My Living Room floor-
This weekend we bought the new living room flooring. Lowes was some good deals that we latched onto and we ended up saving about $200.00 which is always nice. The flooring is stacked up in the dining room now. We need to let it sit for a week or so to acclimate to the surroundings. I’m not sure when we are going to tackle the whole project. I was hoping to take off some time around Thanksgiving to take care of some home tasks, but we have a huge project that needs to roll through the QA/testing machine that is my life these days, so I won’t be taking any time off this year. I’ll just have to work out something. Hopefully we will find someone to buy the 55 gallon aquarium soon so I can get that moved out of the living room.

The old chair-
Back in 1995 or so…when we moved into the house my parents came down for a few days (there last trip to Missouri). They brought a few pieces of furniture like the old camel back trunk that I had refinished in high school, the sewing machine, and this really old chair that had belonged to my great grandmother. The chair was in really bad shape, and my memories from childhood were of the chair always looking pretty hammered. I think my brother Dave sat in it once and broken one of the legs and my Dad patched it back up with some glue, screws and dowels, generally doing a great job to mask the extensive damage. All I remember is that the chair sat at a desk in the living room and no one was supposed to ever sit in it, and we weren't to touch the desk either. Those were the only pieces of furniture my mom had from her family, and since she lost both her parents and only brother when she was in her early 20’s, she wanted to keep what she had. Anyway…you need the back story on the chair to understand my feelings about it. Erik and I looked over the chair and decided it was too damaged to do much with, so I stored it away inside the closet in the spare bedroom. Then it shuffled to my closet, then most recently I stored it inside the shower stall in our bedroom bathroom (we never use the shower in there!)
This weekend I started to think that we could maybe take the chair apart and remake it over into something that we could use. I pulled it most of the way apart and started sketching up some ideas. I would like some kind of coat/hall tree and also an umbrella stand for the entryway, so that’s the direction my brain is going in. I did a Google search and confirmed my general thoughts that the chair is made in the Eastlake style and was probably mass produced sometime between 1880 and 1890. My chair is very similar to the one shown on the web page I linked above. only the seat was completely missing on mine and it was generally pretty hammered. There must be a lot of them out there because prices for a chair in good condition vary from $50-$150. The case with ours isn’t monetary value at all…I just want to be able to display it, and keep some of the decorative pieces. I think it would be cool to make it over and send the pictures to my mom, so I need it to turn out well. So far I’m leaning in the direction of an umbrella stand. I’ll post some pics as this thing starts coming together.