For months we struggled with a thought of throwing away our beloved banana leaf chairs. Our teak table and set of six chairs were one of the first things we ever bought as a couple. We didn’t really want to scrap the chairs… Sadly the decision day has finally come, but instead of taking the chairs to the tip we ripped the banana leaf covering off from the frames. We replaced old, damaged leaf cover with wood from salvaged pallets. The reason why we had to do this was pretty simple- we have cats. We own two of these vandals and when we decided to adopt them few years back, we didn’t realise they would use the chairs as scratching posts.  Over the years the condition of our beloved chairs deteriorated to the point that one of them had a massive hole in the seat and it was time to do something about it. At least we managed to recycle the frames. Have a look at our wooden pallet chairs.

BEFORE

This is how the chairs used to look like.

     RIPPING OFF OLD COVER

It took us few weeks to detach banana leaf covering from the frame. We probably removed a thousand of heavy duty staples from the wood. It was so hard- we had blisters.
     

 NEW COVER

We got this pallets for free. Yes, for free. We live in the brand new estate and when we moved in over a year ago most of the developers were still building and they were using these wooden pallets to transport building materials from street to street. I saw these pallets lying around and not being used by the builders anymore so I asked if I could have few.  The answer was :’sure, help yourself’, so I did. 🙂 Michal dismantled the pallets and cut the boards to size then nailed them to the original frame.
   

SANDING & PAINTING

We used a heavy duty sander to soften the feel and look of the salvaged wood. We also sanded the frame. After Sanding we painted the chairs using Teak Gloss finish Ronseal Varnish. One coat was more then enough and we just love the outcome!
   

END RESULT

We are very pleased with the end result. What do you think?