Good Intentions Didn't Get Me Very Far

...in cleaning up my workspace. I kept coming up with project ideas, until I finally took a break from sorting/labeling/tossing and had a little fun. A few months ago, I bought a few packs of quarter scale brown plastic furniture. Looking through old issues of Little Enough News, I found a page which showed various ways to cut the furniture apart and reassemble it to make other pieces. One of the things I got from the Sturbridge Show was a quarter scale Art Deco house kit. The seller didn't have it at the show, so I haven't started building it yet, but I'm already thinking about how I will furnish it. I decided to see if I could make anything even vaguely Art Deco from the brown plastic furniture.

The desk on the left is the piece I started with. Eventually, the modified piece on the right will be a vanity, with a tall mirror in the center. It obviously needs a paint job to improve the look of the ugly brown plastic, and hide the white plastic I used to modify the shape. I'm hoping that I'll be able to do a realistic looking faux wood.

For this table, I cut off the legs and discarded the pedestal. Then I flipped the legs upside down, glued them to the underside of the table, and added a couple thick blocks of plastic to form a new base.

The chair in the center is the stock brown chair. The little table on the left was made from two of the laddered chair-backs, glued to a scrap square of plastic. The chair on the right is made from two stock chairs. I first removed the back from one of the chairs. Then, I trimmed the legs from the second chair, flipped it over, and glued it to the top of the first chair. With a little more trimming, and a single ladder from the chair back, the second set of legs became the chair's back and arms.

I'm not thrilled with these pieces, but they were a fun diversion. I'm going to continue experimenting with the rest of my stash, and hopefully a bit of paintwork will reduce the plastic look. But first- I have to finish cleaning up!