Furniture!

From Mollie, Props Intern

This week has been all about furniture. I started by completely rebuilding a chair that was donated by a previous SRT employee. The chair was in pieces and covered with at least three coats of paint. Some wonderful 1970's green and orange were included in the mix. I first had to strip off the paint which meant that I used stripping gel to try and get it off. The problem with the gel is that it will strip anything, including your skin from your body. I was careful in using gloves but not careful in my choice of gloves because the stripper ate right through the latex. When I finally switched to industrial strength gloves I was able to successfully get the paint off.

Stripping a chair requres a lot of steps. First there is the first application of the stripping gel, then your scrap off the paint. Since this never gets all of the paint off you muct do a second application. Then you wash it with mineral spirits and finally use steel wool and refinisher to get the stain off of it. The whole process took me about a day to get completely clean. Then after a quick sanding the pieces were ready to go together. Luckily all of the pieces still fit together nicely so all I had to do was glue and clamp.

This was the fourth chair this week that I have had to repair. I fixed two chairs for Betrayal and fixed up another chair that was to go back into stock. I have gotten quite good at fixing these chairs. My other time this week was occupied with getting a cast iron stove, runs to the warehouse, and making two dozen fake tangerines. Another week and more props.