the chair project

My grandmother had some old antique rosewood chairs (probably over 200 years old now), that at some point (maybe 50 years ago) she decided to stain/paint a light gray and reupholster with a light rose pink.  Perhaps in the 1960s, this chair may have looked lovely.  However, today the potentially beautiful chairs are more of a site for sore eyes.  

I mentioned to my father that the chairs might look nice if reupholstered (perhaps adding different padding... the chairs have a little bit of a crunch feel if you can imagine what that means...)

Since their original antique finish was removed long ago... this idea inspired us to try completely stripping the chairs in hopes of restoring the potentially beautiful natural rosewood.

Attempt #1 with some liquid paint stripper got a bit of the paint off, but left us rather dissapointed as the stain remained quite prominent.

In Attempt #2 we bought some more powerful stain remover. I coated the chair with gobs of the gel, and let it sit for almost 40 minutes.

After scrubbing and scrubbing at the chair with steel wool, then hitting it hard with a power hose we still have much work to do, but the second round has given us a little more promise that we might be able to pull this thing off. Currently drying, the chair looks pretty terrible, but I'm not giving up yet!