So it ends as it began

With the realization that the finish on these chairs just isn't holding up to the warm California sun.

Earlier this week I finally got around to doing the last of the scraping on the sixth and final patio chair. I had set it aside a while back because by the time I had got through the first five, this last one had gotten a bit soggy sitting out in the winter rains and I wanted to give it some time to dry out so that I could sand it without the grain getting all stringy.

That was, like, 2 years ago? Maybe more? A while. I've been busy.

But in those two years I happened to notice something: the finish I'd put on the other five chairs wasn't holding up as well as I'd hoped.

You see, as they come from the Ikea factory, these chairs are stained but not varnished. They'd held up ok at my apartment, where they lived a relatively cozy life on the patio, sheltered from the sun and rain by my bamboo and the balcony of the unit above. But not long after I moved them here, I noticed that the finish was starting to come off, and the wood underneath was beginning to weather.

So, I set off to Ikea to buy a few tins of stain.

for the first chair, I took a very minimalist approach, just sanding off the loose bits of stain and then putting a new layer on top. This yielded a somewhat uneven colour that really didn't last well at all. For the second, I tried sanding a bit more, which still left things a bit uneven, but somewhat improved the durability. By the time I got to the 5th chair, I was peeling the old stain off back down to bare wood on pretty much all the exposed surfaces so I could start fresh from scratch with the new stain.

But even that proved not to be enough, as the stain did tend to age and wear rather more quickly than I would have liked, so when it got to chair number 6, I decided to add an extra step and top coat it with a wiping varnish, in hopes that it would help consolidate the surface and give the stain a fighting chance against the elements. I also made the sane choice to disassemble the major chair pieces so that it would be much, much easier to get that finish into all the places it needed to go.

Of course, that still left me with the first 5 chairs, whose finishes were in varying states of decay. And so it is that I begin the process again. Hopefully the lessons learned so far will pay off, and result in a patio furniture set that looks good for years to come.

I do, of course, expect that I'll have to refinish these again somewhere down the line, but it is my goal to push that line out as far as possible.

It does look good all freshened up, though.