Thrifting Vintage Wooden Stools Meant for The Kitchen

Soooooo smething crazy happened. Here is a little hint:

It all began when John and I were lying in bed one night talking about what we’d enjoy to do to make the sunroom more useful slash function slash excellent (it is right now packed with secret book projects, but come fall we can at last clear it out for a charity auction – and hopefully start working on making it a room that we in fact hang out in). We came up with the idea of a long chunky floating bar/counter made from rustic imperfect wood with a few stools pulled up to it along one right now unused wall. You know, sort of like this one or this one (but not exactly like either one of them for reasons we will get into down the line).

A chunky little wood bar along one wall in there with some plain pull-up stools would be especially functional for us because:

• we would not have to put a big table in the middle of the room for reading the paper, sipping drinks, snacking, and general chillaxing (which means the daybed will not be too cramped and can stay in there – yay!)
• when we have Clara’s annual party or simply invite people over to hang out, we typically set out food and stuff in the sunroom (so everyone can mill around in there, on the upper patio and on the lower patio) so having a built in bar for setting out all the food and drinks instead of dragging various pieces of furniture into the room and tossing a tablecloth over them would be truly pleasant

SOLD.

So the next morning I dove into a daydream about how it would be lively to make that cool chunky wood bar/counter for the stools ourselves with some old hunk of wood and some plain brackets – simply to add some rustic edge to the space and to make it less precious at parties (no real worries about drink rings since we’d stain it dark and seal it to protect it). And then I began thinking about how I’d want the stools to be counter height since the ones in the kitchen have worked out so well (they are not as high and teetery as bar height chairs) so I mindlessly simply typed in craigslist.org and searched “stools.” And then – I kid you not – the top entry made me suck air. Audibly. They were the. coolest. stools. ever.

You think I am kidding. Check these babies out:

Forty bucks a pop, retro slatted wood with molded seats, cool dark iron hardware on them, and get this – THEY SWIVEL! The funny thing is when I googled around for similar stools, a few nearly identical versions popped up, like href=”http://guffonline.blogspot.com/2010/02/vintage-wood-and-iron-barstools.html” target=”_blank”> these for $85 a pop, and these for nearly $120. So to get them for $40 each truly saved us a ton (we got four for about the price of one and a half).

So… SOLD FOR SURE.

Well, in fact not sold until I showed them to John (we both have to sign off on things, so sometimes things are dead in the water when the second person nixes them) but lo and behold, John did not simply like them, he enjoyed them. And in fact demanded (nicely) that I call about them “right now before they are gone.” All the good stuff is consistently snatched up off of our Craigslist within the day things are listed, so I ran my buns to the phone and made that call.

So then they were SOLD FOR REAL! To us. Wahoo.

When we got them into the house we were chatting about how wood stools with a chunky wood counter/bar would be a lot of wood – but it would be a large shame to paint the chairs since they are so cool and slatted and vintage and all that jazz. So we chose we could make a sleek white counter instead of a wood one in the sunroom. But then a better idea came into the play. That is when the bright idea to bring them into the kitchen popped up (duh, there is already a white counter in there).

SOLD!

Long story long, John and I enjoyed them so much in the kitchen that we chose that our lively blue metal stools would be excellent for the rustic sunroom bar. Rough chunky wood sounds fairly lively paired with sleek boldly painted metal, right? So it is totally weird that I ever even went on craigslist to look for stools… and then the fact that I found some, fell in love, chain-reactioned John into falling in love, and ended up with them is all kind of a whirlwind. We are taking it as a sign that they are meant to be.

They are simply so darn fairly in the kitchen with the rich cork floors, our chunky wood cutting boards, and even things like the woven light and the wood mirror by the fireplace. So… SOLD ALL OVER AGAIN.

And now I will wow you with how many angles I can photograph our new stools:

We enjoy our blue folks too, so who knows, perhaps they’ll come back in the spring or something when we are feeling flirty. Haha. And who knows, perhaps once the sunroom’s done we will ultimately enjoy the wood stools in there and the blue folks might end up back in the kitchen. Either way, it is fairly hilarious that we have two stool sets going on, but at least they were both truly affordable (we got the first set from an online school supply store for $32 each) and we are truly in love with both of them… and have a functional use in mind for both sets. Simply do not ask us who our go-to stool baby is. We enjoy them all equally. Although if they are jockeying for most comfortable, the new folks certainly have a bit of an edge with the curved seat and the swivel-action. Dinners at the peninsula simply got more lively swivel-tastic. As for what Clara does, she has the yellow highchair I painted for her, so we simply move that around to various places (peninsula, dining table, living room pedestal table) and she eats in that. Girl gets around. Haha.

In short: Party at our house. We will bring the stools. And likely say SOLD a lot.

Oh and we simply used these things on the feet. Simply to make sure they do not do evil things to our cork floor. So far, so good.

Now that we have more natural wood in the room, we are thinking about bringing some up onto the floating shelves on the other side of the kitchen, simply because the wood mirror and our new (old) swivel stools have warmed things up and brought in so much texture and “homey-ness” that we’d enjoy to add some to the open shelves too. Perhaps simply in the form of some rustic wooden salad bowls…

Have you folks gotten ahead of yourself and ended up getting something for a future project simply because it was too good to pass up? And once you got it home did it end up shifting other things around in surprising ways? So funny how things mutate as ya go. It is like our house is a ninja turtle.

Pssst- Our newest addition of Clara Conversations is up over on the house Life. We might be biased, but we think she’s is fairly hilarious…