Swedish Dux dining table and chairs save Part one!. Long time gone but back in the "blog" saddle again!

Even though I've been remiss in posting anything new in quite some time, there are somethings that come across my always interesting work space that deserve sharing and this is one of those things.

A good customer of mine had come across what he described as a nice Dux Swedish table and 8 chairs he acquired for a pretty good deal and wondered if I had an interest. Send me some pics and I'll take a look as I have a few customers that are always looking for larger dining sets. Little did I know at the time what I was in for.

In doing some research I would say this is likely a Folke Ohlsson design and looking at the construction is probably from the late 50's. As I couldn't really afford to buy this set set outright from my customer, and I couldn't get anyone to bite for the upfront cost, I convinced him to let me rehab the set and put it in the store and I would make sure he got what he needed out of the set. He was amenable to my offer and off we go!

This particular dining set is all solid walnut construction and although the wood was a bit dry and had the usual latex paint marks over most of the legs all the framed pieces cleaned up pretty nicely with some teak oil and some 0000 steel wool and several hours of elbow grease. Even the table top was pretty pristine considering 60 years of use. This turned out to be the easiest part and the chair frames turned out great!

 The biggest hurdle to rehabbing this set turned out to be the seat and back cushions. Normally not a big deal if you just need to recover and these were thankfully made to take apart pretty easily.
The major problem was these were constructed with the old latex foam which had turned to stone over the years. These would all need to be stripped totally down and redone. Here's where the real fun begins!

Just pull the original fabric and these would just pop apart, right?
Yeah, maybe not so easy. I had to literally scrape every inch of the original foam off all the seats which were at least bent plywood. When I started on the backs I thankfully didn't destroy the original webbing on the first one until I discovered how they were constructed. I can't believe how well made these are and that it looks like I can actually perhaps be able to pull this off!

Everything is prepped and new foam and batting are now in house. I had just enough fabric on hand to do this! Six plus yards and it looks like I can just make it work with little or no room for screwing up! After 20-30 hours I think I'm ready to get the upholstery show going!
My hope is to be able to get this out in the store in the next week if everything falls into place.
I'll be doing a follow up on how the upholstery work is coming along and hopefully the finished set as it turns out in the next post of you have an interest.
As always, thanks for taking a look!