Furniture: Dining Room: Feeling Blue

This is not my favorite set, mostly because of the color. I dont think it goes with the yellow and orange of the house-its not earth tone in any way. I guess it was part of the early seventies space age look. I also dont get the pink accents to the cookware and table accesories. I can sort of acccept the solid blue seats of the set pictured here, but most chairs out there have the ugly patterned upholstery. The clear table top and doors to the china hutch relate to the clear orange doors on the oven which is cool, but its still BLUE!! Brown is my suggestion to this noticable gaffe.

One needs tweezers to set this table. 

Crisp, minty, unfaded china. 

Faded to green.....

As the China Hutch originally appeared in stores. Circa 1981.

I just realized this week, in the 14 years I have been collecting and renovating the 1978 Barbie A Frame DreamHouse, I have never had the 4 dining room chairs! So, this week, I finally followed up on that and got a near complete set for about $35, great seller on Feebay, BTW. Initially, I planned to remove all the upholstery and padding that would inevitably be stuck on the seats by now, as I saw a rather good looking picture of 4 dark blue chairs uncovered, for sale, for about $45. I came to know these chairs came in different color combos of dark and light blue, as well as white/cream before they were molded in pink in the 80s. The best way to slide off the top to reveal the fabric under lining is to slowly, evenly, pry open the lower half off in a horizontal direction, be patient, and you will not break off any pegs. Also, the chair sides are differentiated, so when putting together there is an outer and inner edge to the chair sides. A few of mine did not snap on the side pegs, but basically stay together. Another fun fact, the table is stamped 1978 and the chairs are stamped 1977. Personally, I am not a fan of the fabric pattern. I think a solid blue would have been great. Here in the picture below I first toenail clippered off the original plastic parts tree debris, then carefully sanded off the remaining excess with a Dremel tool sander bit on low setting, after this, lightly clean, then lightly polish plastic parts with minderal oil (being careful not to touch fabric) and they will shine like glass, I didn't take off the fabric in this case because, as in the case of the sofa I uncovered, it's A LOT of work and the seats aren't dark blue like I thought they would be, they are light blue like the legs:

The set I saw online, gorgeous specimans, either fabric was never applied (since the upholstery rots to the seats, or it was meticulously cleaned off, there is a slight fabric pattern to the hard platic seat pieces:

Below is a chair I repaired; had a missing leg and didn't want to spend another 30-45 on another set of chairs to complete my set, so made it out of dollar store poster board by tracing the leg it had on it, carefully carving out with a sharp exacto knife, sanded it, put 2 coats of dollar tree or Walmart baby blue water based paint on it, let dry, drilled 2 of the smallest drill bit holes to pop it on, fits tighter than the vintage plastic leg, I could add the little crossbar at the bottom but it's steady enough for now.