via Parker Kennedy Living
I am THRILLED that my dream of having vintage bamboo chairs has come to life as of last Thursday! I purchased 4 vintage bamboo chairs from Facebook Marketplace for only $40 total. WHAAAAAAT??? I pick them up this week when the seller is back in town and I can’t express to you how excited I am. I have big plans for these chairs and I’m taking you along for the DIY ride!
Today’s post will be about my love for vintage bamboo chairs, my plans for them, and inspiration I’ve found for the DIY. It’s going to be a really fun project. In the next few posts about this project, I’ll be crowdsourcing opinions. Here’s where you come in: should I paint the bamboo white or leave it as is? I’m also going to need you to weigh in on which fabric I should choose.
How I Got the Bamboo Chairs
So I recently started thrifting, and a post on that will be coming up because it is amazing and more people should do it. So, here’s what happened: every so often I check out Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace (FBM) for vintage furniture and/or secondhand furniture in general. I’m in the process of Wabi Sabi-ing my apartment aka replacing cheaper furniture with lasting pieces. Don’t worry, I’m anti-landfill, so all of the things I’m getting rid of go to another home and not the dump.
I saw these vintage bamboo chairs were posted a week ago but they weren’t labeled as sold, so I messaged asking if they were still available and they were! But how??? These chairs are a set of 4, real bamboo, vintage, great condition, and only $40 IN MANHATTAN?! After messaging some more, it turned out the seller had been out of town for 3 weeks and was also juggling other potential buyers. Wonderful. So, I’m the last person to inquire about these chairs and probably won’t get them. The seller said to be fair, he was going to message everyone who wanted the chairs when he returned to the city and it would be first come first served.
Arrrrrgh. So close. While that is fair, and I work from home I could probably be the first one to respond, I wouldn’t be able to transport 4 chairs by myself using public transit. I would have to wait until Sean came home from work to pick them up. This would leave many hours for someone else to swoop in…so I swooped in instead.
I messaged the seller asking if I could pay him now for the chairs to stake my claim. He said no one else had offered that and agreed to sell them to me. Fast forward an hour, the payment went through, and my only job now is to wait for him to fly back to the city. I did say I trusted him not to take my money and run, because it’s definitely not the smartest thing to hand money to a stranger before seeing your items in person. Here they are in all their glory:
For the record, I am always putting everyone else above myself. This was a rare case of assertiveness and bravery to push myself to the top of that list, and I actually feel terrible. I think about how I selfishly moved myself in front of 5 others. I think about those others who really were more entitled to those chairs than me because I was last on the list. But another part of me is proud. I never do stuff like this. I wanted these chairs and I used creative problem solving and leadership to step up and find a way to make them mine. And it worked brilliantly.
My Plans
I’m going to pick these up later in the week and to save money, we are going to try to take them on the subway. LOL. I’m laughing just thinking how ridiculous this will be. City life is hard, ya’ll! I’ll probably post our journey because it will be hilarious…like the time we bought 3 giant house plants at IKEA Brooklyn and had to get them to 200th street in Manhattan. Life is funny.
My plan for these chairs is to reupholster the seat and I’m considering painting them white using this tutorial. Ugh, I hate that I just said that. Painting wood makes me cringe because a couple years ago I went on a painting frenzy and I miss the look of raw wood.
Sure, it’s not difficult to strip paint or a stain, so nothing is ever permanent, but do you know how hard that will be with all those round edges? Can you even sand bamboo? I might live with the natural wood for a bit and then decide…although, after looking at inspirational images, I’m realllly digging the white look.
Inspiration
The shape of my chairs is different than the infamous bamboo Chippendale chairs, but the style is similar. I want to reupholster using a fabric that is vibrant, but won’t stand out the most in the space. Two of the chairs will be in the living room, and the other two will sadly be in the closet until I make a plan for them.
You see, we don’t use our dining table for eating, but as a shared work space. So dining chairs aren’t something we need. One of the chairs will be at the dining table as my work chair, the other will be on the other side of the room on a soon to be revealed console desk that I recently DIY’ed.
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I chose these inspirational images based on the color scheme and the feel of the entire room, not just the chairs alone. I love color and pattern, and plan to incorporate that. I love the look of brightly painted vintage bamboo chairs. I think they are so so beautiful and fun. We have a large raw oak farmhouse table, so painted chairs would look lovely, if we were using these as dining chairs. Which we are not.
Aren’t these images beautiful? I’ve been admiring vintage bamboo chairs from afar for years and I cannot believe they will be mine. One of the reasons I love vintage furniture is because of the architectural detailing you just can’t find anymore. Vintage furniture is such good quality (for the most part), and I look forward to giving these chairs a makeover, over and over, for as long as I own them.
Stay tuned!
-Kristen
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