Black Friday Outdoor Furniture Deals That Last Past Spring
The Black Friday email lands at 4 a.m. and the number in the subject line is always the same, 60 percent off, as if that were a fact about the furniture instead of a fact about the original price tag. Somewhere there is a pallet of patio chairs that was engineered to be marked down before it was ever engineered to be sat in. This is a guide to the other kind of outdoor seating, the kind you buy once and then stop thinking about. It starts with the question the sale flyer would rather you skip.
The Math Behind a 60 Percent Off Patio Chair
Here is the part nobody prints on the sign. A chair that lists at $180 and sells for $72 on the last Friday in November was probably never a $180 chair. It was designed backward from the discount. The resin is thin because thin resin ships cheap, the powder coat is one pass instead of three, and the cushion is polyester wrapped around foam that will hold water like a sponge by its second summer.
None of that is a scandal. It is a business model, and it works, because most people replace patio furniture on roughly a four year cycle and have quietly made peace with that. You buy in year one. You notice the fade in year two. A leg gets wobbly in year three. In year four the whole set is at the curb with a FREE sign taped to it that nobody honors.
The cost of that cycle is easy to miss because it never shows up as a single number. Four discount chairs at $72 each is $288. Run that three times across a decade and you are past $850 just to have somewhere to sit outside, and that is before cushions, before the vinyl covers, before the two Saturdays a year you gave back hauling everything into the garage ahead of the first hard freeze.
We do not run doorbusters, mostly because we cannot. Every piece is built to order by people in Colorado from skis and boards that already had a life. There is no warehouse of overstock to blow out and no inflated list price to cut in half for a weekend. What there is, is a $469 Mystery Ski Chair, which is a real finished chair from a real build run where we pick the design instead of you, and you save on it for allowing that. It is sold as is with no returns, and it is in stock, which in late November is worth more than a percentage sign.
So the honest pitch is not that we beat the sale. It is that we are playing a completely different game, one where the chair is still on the deck in 2036.
The Ten Year Test for Outdoor Seating
Forget brands for a minute. If you are shopping outdoor seating this weekend, on any site, there are five things worth checking before the price. They take about ninety seconds to look up and they tell you more than a hundred reviews will.
- Stated weight capacity. A real number means somebody tested it. Our Adirondack ski chairs carry a 400 lb capacity, and the Customizable Single Snowboard Coffee Table is rated past 700 lbs, which is more than any coffee table should ever need to prove.
- What the frame is actually made of. Not “solid construction.” A species. Ours is Douglas fir, because it is stiff, it takes fasteners without splitting, and it is grown a few hundred miles from the shop.
- The finish. High quality exterior oil paint behaves very differently from a spray booth clear coat over particle-adjacent material. One weathers. The other peels in sheets.
- The warranty, in years, in writing. Ours is 3 years, hassle free. Yup.
- A phone number that reaches a human. Ours is 303.775.7273, and it is answered by someone who has personally sanded a chair.
That last one sounds soft and it is not. The reason cheap furniture fails permanently is not that a part broke. It is that no part is replaceable and there is nobody to ask. A chair with a warranty and a phone number is a chair with a second act. A chair with a QR code that routes to a chatbot in a different time zone is landfill on a delay.
Apply the same five questions to whatever else is in your cart this weekend. Some of the sale items will pass, honestly. Plenty of good furniture goes on sale for legitimate reasons, end of season, discontinued color, a retailer clearing floor space. The test is not whether something is discounted. The test is whether the discount is the entire personality of the product. Browse the run of handmade ski chairs if you want to see what the answers look like when they are all filled in.
What Actually Goes Into One of These Chairs
A single Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of retired skis. Not four skis. Four to five pairs, eight to ten individual planks, each one sorted, cleaned, cut and laid up so the graphics line up in a way that looks deliberate instead of accidental. A matched set of two takes eight to ten pairs. That is a closet’s worth of gear that was otherwise going to the dump, and it is the single fact that surprises people most when they visit the shop.
The base underneath is Douglas fir. The arms carry a ski binding repurposed into a cup holder, which is the detail everyone photographs, and it is sized generously enough for a stein rather than a thimble of espresso. Finished dimensions on the signature chair run 45 inches tall by 36 deep and 32 wide, which is a full size Adirondack, comfortable for people from about 3 feet to 6 feet 10. It is not a bistro chair pretending to be a lounge chair.
One thing worth saying plainly, because it comes up on every custom order. We do not paint logos. If you want a team mark, a company mark or an alma mater on a piece, it goes on as a decal or an applique. Painted logos look painted, they craze at the edges after a couple of seasons, and we would rather tell you that up front than argue about it in March.
On our unpainted work the design is not applied at all. The original factory graphics on the retired skis are the whole thing. That is what the Signature Customizable Ski Chair is at $595, our first design and still the one people come back for. You tell us at checkout which brands or colors you want us to hunt down in the rack, and we go hunt. If you would rather have the pair, the Set of 2 Ski Chairs is $997 with the ski colors chosen by you, and the second chair does not cost extra to ship. Most of our chairs ship free to the lower 48.
Sizing Outdoor Seating for the Space You Actually Have
The most common mistake in holiday furniture buying is not overspending. It is buying for a deck you have in your head rather than the one out the back door. Go measure it. Right now, before the sale timer runs out, with an actual tape. It takes four minutes and it will save you a return shipment.
A full size Adirondack ski chair needs a footprint of about 36 inches deep by 32 wide, and it wants a foot of clearance behind it so the recline does not put the back rail against the siding. Two of them plus a small table is a comfortable eight foot run of deck. If your deck is a balcony, that math does not work and you should not force it.
For tighter spaces there is the Tall Alpine Compact Chair at $589, which keeps the 45 inch height but pulls in to 30 inches deep by 26 wide. Same retired skis, same Douglas fir base, same exterior oil paint. It just stops eating the walkway. On a narrow condo deck or a covered front porch with a railing, that six inch difference is the whole difference.
Benches solve a different geometry problem. The 3-Ski Narrow Bench runs roughly 60 inches long by 18 deep by 17 tall with a 300 lb capacity, and 18 inches deep is the number that matters. That is narrow enough to live against a wall in an entryway without turning the hall into an obstacle course, which is why it also works between two chairs on a patio as a low table. The snowboard version, at roughly 58 by 18 by 14, sits lower and reads more like a coffee table. Both are light enough to carry outside for an afternoon and bring back in, which is a feature people underestimate until the first time it rains.
If you are furnishing an entry, a mudroom and a deck at the same time, the full lineup of ski and snowboard benches is worth a scroll. Measure first. Then scroll.
Building the Fire Pit Circle One Piece at a Time
Nobody buys a fire pit circle in one transaction, and that is fine. Most of the sets we ship started as one chair three years ago. The person liked it, put it by the pit, and then noticed that the folding camp chair next to it looked like a folding camp chair. That is how this works.
If you want to skip the slow version, the Customizable Fire Pit Starter Set is $2,391 for two signature Adirondack ski chairs and a matching ski bench, all left unpainted so the original ski graphics carry the whole design. Pick the brands you want, pick the colors you want, or just tell us the colors to leave out, which is honestly the easier instruction for most people. Two chairs and a bench is somewhere north of a dozen pairs of retired skis, which is a genuinely strange thing to have in your backyard and a good story at every gathering you host.
Not everybody wants skis, and that is worth saying on a site called Colorado Ski Chairs. Barrel furniture is a different animal entirely, built from repurposed oak wine and whiskey barrel staves rather than from skis. The Whiskey Barrel Adirondack Chairs with Matching Side Table is $1,991 for the set of three, handcrafted from reclaimed oak barrels, oiled and sealed with four coats of marine varnish. Every edge is rounded to a 3/8 inch radius before assembly, so there is nothing on it to catch a shin in the dark. Each chair picks up its own color from the toasting of the barrel and the years the whiskey spent soaking into the staves, which means the set matches without being identical.
Whichever direction you go, plan on 2 to 4 weeks for a custom build. Some simple assembly is required on the barrel pieces. And if you would rather hand pick the exact chair, the shop is in Manitou Springs and you are welcome to come stand in it.
Cold Weather Is Not the Off Season
There is an assumption baked into the phrase “patio furniture” that it is a summer object, and that assumption is why so much of it dies. Furniture that has to be dragged inside every October is furniture you are going to fail to drag inside one October.
Ours stays out. Exterior oil paint, weatherproof by design, no cushions to soak, no covers to buy, no January storage problem. Snow lands on a ski chair and looks correct, which is a small thing but not nothing. You brush it off with a glove, you sit down, and the chair is 34 degrees and you sit down anyway because you have a hot drink and a fire going twelve feet away.
That is the actual argument for good outdoor seating in a Colorado winter. Not that it survives the weather. That it lets you use the yard in weather you would otherwise cede to the season. A December evening at 20 degrees with a fire is a genuinely pleasant place to be for about forty minutes, and forty minutes is exactly as long as anyone wants to be out there anyway.
You will want somewhere to set the mug down. The ski binding cup holder in the arm handles it, but the Whiskey Barrel Side Table at $299 is the piece people end up glad they bought. It is 18 by 19 by 18 inches, built from a repurposed whiskey barrel with the char and the aging color still in the wood, hand painted, weather proof, and it ships free. The top holds two glasses, a book and a phone. No two of them come out the same, because no two barrels age the same. On a warm day, if you get close, it still smells faintly of its previous career.
A quick word of caution about winter and cheap furniture generally. Water gets into a hollow leg, freezes, expands, and splits the leg from the inside. That is not a manufacturing defect, that is physics, and it is the single most common way a discount patio set dies between November and March. Solid wood does not have that failure mode.
Buying One as a Gift Without Blowing the Surprise
Furniture is a hard gift. It is expensive enough to be a statement, large enough that it cannot be hidden in a closet, and specific enough that getting the colors wrong is worse than getting nothing. Here is how people actually pull it off.
The first move is to buy the piece and not the exact design. Order it, tell us what you know about the recipient, and we will work the ski colors around it. If they went to school somewhere with strong colors, that is enough to go on. If they only ski one brand and will talk your ear off about it, that is more than enough. What you should not do is guess at a specific graphic and hope.
The second move is to shop by budget instead of by category, which is how most people are actually thinking in late November. The ski gifts sorted by price page is built for exactly that, and it is a considerably better experience than a parking lot at six in the morning. If what matters is that the thing was made here rather than shipped across an ocean, the Colorado made gift collection is the same idea sorted by provenance.
The third move is the rocker, which is an underrated gift because it reads as more thoughtful than it costs. The Set of 2 Ski Rocking Chairs is $1,191 for two hand painted Adirondack ski chairs on rockers, 45 inches tall by 36 deep and 32 wide, with binding cup holders in the arms. Two rockers on a porch is a specific image, and it lands differently than two chairs.
And if the recipient already owns skis they cannot bear to throw out, that is its own conversation. Give us a call at 303.775.7273 and we will walk you through what happens to a pair of retired skis that already means something to somebody.
Ordering Around the Holiday Calendar
Custom work takes 2 to 4 weeks, and the last two weeks of December are not the time to discover that. Here is the realistic timeline, said out loud so nobody is disappointed.
If you order a custom build the weekend after Thanksgiving, you are in good shape for Christmas. If you order it the second week of December, you are gambling, and the honest answer is that you should call rather than click. We will tell you what is actually possible on your dates instead of letting the checkout page imply something we cannot deliver.
If you are ordering late, the ready to ship pieces exist for exactly this reason. Those are finished, in the building, boxed and gone the same week. The Mystery Ski Chair is the flagship of that group at $469, because it is already built, and the only concession you make is that we chose the design instead of you. We do not build ugly ones, so the odds are good.
A few other things worth knowing before you commit. Most of our chairs ship free to the lower 48, and on the sets the second chair does not add a shipping charge. Custom color requests do not carry a surcharge, they carry time, so tell us early. On the pieces where we go pull inventory to match a request, we text you photos of what we found before we build, so you are approving actual skis and not a rendering. And the 3 year hassle free warranty applies the same at $299 as it does at $2,391.
One last piece of advice that costs us money and is true anyway. If your budget this season is under $200, do not stretch for a chair. Buy the smallest real thing instead, keep the cash, and get the chair next year when it is not a stretch. Furniture bought on a stretch has a way of feeling like an obligation every time you look at it, and that defeats the entire purpose of a place to sit outside.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are Black Friday outdoor furniture deals ever actually worth it?
Sometimes, yes. End of season clearance and discontinued colorways are real discounts on real furniture. What to avoid is anything where the discount is the whole pitch, because a chair engineered around a markdown price is engineered around a markdown price all year. Check the stated weight capacity, the frame material by name, and the warranty in years. If a listing will not tell you those three things, the sale price is not the bargain it appears to be.
How many skis go into one Adirondack ski chair?
Four to five pairs of retired skis per chair, so eight to ten individual skis. A matched set of two takes eight to ten pairs. Snowboard pieces work differently. A snowboard chair needs at least three boards, while a single retired snowboard makes a bench or a coffee table on its own, which is why the single board coffee table comes in well under the price of a chair.
Can this furniture stay outside through a Colorado winter?
That is what it is built for. High quality exterior oil paint over a Douglas fir base, no cushions to soak through and no covers to store. Snow, sun and freeze cycles are the normal operating conditions, not the exception. It is worth a rinse in the spring and that is roughly the extent of the maintenance. Everything carries a 3 year hassle free warranty, indoors or out.
How late can I order and still have it by the holidays?
Custom builds run 2 to 4 weeks, so the weekend after Thanksgiving is comfortable and the second week of December is a gamble. If you are cutting it close, call 303.775.7273 and we will give you a straight answer about your dates. Ready to ship pieces like the Mystery Ski Chair leave the same week, which is the reliable move for a late gift.
