Upcycling and repurposing old furniture that has seen better days makes perfect sense to me, although it’s not everybody’s cup of tea. However, there’s always scope for doing hacks on newer items of furniture to make them more individual or unique.

I will be blogging about my learning curve in the pursuit of upcycling old items, many of them would be considered junk by a lot of folk, but to me they’ve all got the potential to be something special.

Furniture has always been recycled to a certain extent, passed down the generations, maybe reupholstered, repainted, refinished, French polished, etc. Who remembers those fabulous wooden kitchen units that so many homes had in the fifties and sixties, they had Formica tops, the carcasses were usually painted white and the drawer fronts and cupboard doors were painted a different colour? When you wanted a new look you just got out the paint pot and changed the colour scheme, a fabulous example of upcycling! Years ago people took better care of the furniture they had as it was very costly to replace and they had worked damn hard to afford it in the first place. Things ‘Had To Last’, we were reminded at every opportunity. It’s only due to that mindset that we’re seeing so much mid-century retro furniture, such as G Plan, Nathan, Ercol, along with older furniture, which has survived intact in good condition.

My earliest upcycling project was in the early 1980s when I painted two brown varnished bentwood chairs which had been passed around the family for decades. In order to make them match my bedroom colour scheme, I decided it was time for them to have a long overdue makeover. Armed with pale pink gloss paint, I set about them, and although they had a couple of drip marks on them, they turned out quite well, considering it was the first thing I had ever painted. Suddenly bentwood chairs are back in fashion especially for upcycling purposes. Who knew that what was considered junk in the 1980s would be in high demand in the next century?

#zerotohero #recycled #repurposed #upcycled #reloved