Personalized Outdoor Furniture Made in Colorado From Your Skis
There is a pair of skis in your garage right now that you have not clicked into since the Clinton administration. They are up in the rafters or behind the mower, the bases are dry, and every spring you decide this is the year you finally deal with them and every spring you do not. That pile is where most of our personalized outdoor furniture starts, and the reason people finally call is almost never the skis themselves. It is that they want something in the yard that belongs to them and not to a catalog.
The Pile in the Garage, and What It Is Actually Worth
Skis do not age gracefully. The bases oxidize, the edges pit, the topsheets peel where the sun hit them through a garage window for fifteen summers. Nobody is skiing on your 198s again and both of us know it. But the graphics on that topsheet still date you the second anyone looks at them, and that is exactly the value.
Every pair carries evidence. The core shot from the rock that absolutely was not there. The lift ticket wickets you never cut off, three seasons stacked on one another like rings on a stump. The pair you learned on, straight and long and unforgiving, back when a bad day meant you skied it anyway. That is not sentimental nonsense, that is a record of about twenty years of Saturdays, and it is currently keeping a lawnmower company.
What we do is cut, shape and rebuild those skis into a chair you will actually sit in. Not a wall hanging, not a shadow box. A chair on the deck that holds a person and a beer and takes weather. The distinction matters, because a keepsake you look at gets dusted twice a year and a keepsake you sit in gets used every single evening from May through October.
Fair warning on quantity, because this is the part people get wrong. One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of skis. Not one pair, not two. A matched set of two chairs runs eight to ten pairs. So the four skis in your rafters are a start, not a chair. Most people end up calling their brother, their old ski partner, or the guy at the shop who has a pile in the back. Mismatched pairs are welcome. They usually look more interesting anyway.
What Personalized Actually Means Here
The word gets used loosely. On most furniture sites, personalized means you picked a cushion color from a grid of nine. That is a configuration, not a personalization, and there is nothing wrong with it except the price they charge for it.
Here it means something narrower and stranger. It means the raw material came from your life. Your skis, your kid’s first snowboard, your dad’s clubs, the hockey sticks from the garage that your son broke over a season and a half. The piece is not customized to your taste, it is built out of your stuff. Two people can order the same chair and end up with objects that share nothing but the frame geometry.
The second layer is what goes on top. Hand painted murals in exterior oils, a name or a date across the front board, team colors, a mountain profile you can identify from your own deck. This is where taste comes in, and it is where a good conversation on the phone saves everybody a month. We would rather ask three questions up front than deliver something technically correct and emotionally wrong.
The third layer is the boring one that nobody advertises. Sizing, seat angle, whether it becomes a rocker, whether it lives on a flat stone patio or on decking that runs downhill by an inch over three feet. Any chair can be converted to a rocker for $75 more, built on repurposed oak wine barrel slats. Small decisions, but they are the difference between furniture that fits your house and furniture that just occupies it. The full range lives under Custom Designs.
How Your Skis Become a Chair
Ship the skis, drop them off in Manitou Springs, or we can pick them up in Colorado. From there the process is more surgical than people expect.
The skis get sorted first, by length, by stiffness and by how good the topsheet still looks, because the graphics that survived best end up where the eye lands. Then they get cut. A ski is a laminate of wood, metal edge, fiberglass and P-tex, and cutting one cleanly is not the same as cutting a board. Blades wear out. The metal edges are the reason. That is part of why a chair takes four to five pairs, since the usable sections of any given ski are shorter than the ski.
The cut sections mount to a Douglas Fir base. Fir is the structural spine of the whole thing, and it is why the chair sits flat on a stone patio instead of teetering the way a chair built purely from skis would. Finished dimensions run 45 inches tall by 36 inches deep by 32 inches wide, which is sized comfortably for people from 3 feet to 6 feet 10. We have measured that range against actual customers, not against a spec sheet.
Then the details. A ski binding gets repurposed into the cup holder on the arm, sized for a stein rather than a shot glass, and it is the feature people photograph most. Everything painted goes on in high quality exterior oil paint, which is colorful and weatherproof and holds up through Colorado sun better than any deck stain will. Rated to 400 lb capacity, with a 3 year hassle free warranty. Yup.
Start to finish, most personalized work runs two to four weeks in the shop. If your skis are long gone, tell us the brand and the era and we will track down something close, which is not the same as the real thing but is a lot better than nothing.
Murals, Front Boards and the Truth About Logos
The painted work is where personalized outdoor furniture either becomes something you love or something you tolerate, so it is worth understanding what is actually possible.
Murals are hand painted in exterior oils, on the chair, by a person with a brush. Mountain profiles, sunsets over a specific ridge, columbines, a lake you have a history with, northern lights behind a treeline. The good ones are the ones with a reason. A generic mountain scene is fine. A mountain scene of the view from the cabin the chair is going to sit in front of hits differently, and it costs the same.
The front board is the smaller and cheaper version of the same idea. A hand painted custom front board runs $75 to $100 and carries a family name, a date, a season, a nickname, or the phrase somebody’s grandfather said every single time he pushed off. For a lot of buyers this is the entire personalization budget and it does most of the emotional work.
Now the part where we tell you something you may not want to hear. A logo is never painted. Not by us, not well by anybody. Hand painting a registered mark means reproducing precise geometry and exact brand color by eye, and the result is always slightly wrong in a way that bothers the one person you were trying to impress. What we do instead is float a logo decal onto a hand painted background, so the mark is exact and everything around it is done by hand. Aluminum and plastic appliques are the alternatives when you want depth or a metallic look.
Branded pricing gets quoted on a call, every time. It depends on the mark, the quantity, the placement and how much painted background sits behind it, and anybody who gives you a firm branded number off a web form has not looked at your logo yet.
Who Orders Personalized Work
The largest group is families closing a chapter. A parent passes and the skis are still in the garage, and giving them to a thrift store feels wrong while keeping them in a rafter feels pointless. Rebuilding them into a chair the grandkids sit in solves a problem that nobody had words for. These calls are quiet and they take longer than a normal order call, and that is fine.
Second is retirement and milestone gifts. Thirty years of service, a last day, a fiftieth birthday. The gift that works is the one that says somebody paid attention, and a chair built from that person’s own gear is unarguable proof of attention. We do a lot of military and first responder work in this category, usually with a crest and a front board.
Third is mountain homeowners and rental hosts furnishing a place with an identity. A cabin outside Breckenridge with generic patio furniture looks like a cabin with generic patio furniture. The same deck with a ski chair built from local gear tells guests where they are before anyone says a word. Hosts tend to order in pairs or fours, which is why Sentimental Ski Chairs as a set of two from $1,088 outsell the single on that side of the business. Remember the arithmetic there, though. A set of two wants eight to ten pairs of skis.
There is a fourth group worth naming, and it is the one that produces the best phone calls. Couples ordering for an anniversary, usually with both sets of skis going into a single bench so the piece is literally half his and half hers. That one is the Sentimental Ski Bench, from $1,441, and it is the only piece we sell that regularly gets ordered by two people at once on speakerphone. The design conversation on those is a negotiation, and we have learned to just let it happen and take notes. Whatever they land on is almost always better than what either of them called in with, and the bench ends up on a porch they will both still be sitting on in fifteen years.
Fifth, and this one surprises people, is racers, patrollers and instructors buying for themselves. They have more retired gear than anyone alive and they are the least sentimental group we deal with, right up until the chair shows up and they immediately text us a photo of it on the deck.
Beyond Skis: Boards, Sticks, Clubs and Barrels
Skis are the majority of what comes through the door, but they are not the only raw material with a past.
Snowboards work differently because a board is wider and there are fewer of them per person. A snowboard chair needs at least three boards. A single board, on the other hand, makes a very good coffee table or a bench, which is the right answer when someone has exactly one board they care about and no intention of collecting more. The benches category shows what that looks like finished. Boards also take murals beautifully, since you have a wide continuous surface to paint on instead of a series of narrow slats.
Hockey sticks take twelve to fifteen sticks for a chair. If you have a kid who plays, you have that many broken sticks by the end of a couple of seasons without trying, and the Sentimental Hockey Stick Chair starts at $675. Golf is simpler. A golf club chair takes one full set, which means the clubs your dad played for thirty years become one object instead of a bag nobody will ever swing. Those live in Golf Club Chairs.
Then there is barrel oak, which is a different kind of history. Barrel chairs are built from reclaimed oak whiskey and wine barrel staves, and they carry char lines and wine stain instead of topsheet graphics. Not personalized in the same way, but built from something that lived a life first, which is the same principle. If nobody in the family skied, that is often the better direction.
Where Personalized Pieces End Up
Decks and patios first, obviously. That is what these are built for and the finish is rated for it. A ski chair on a deck facing west is the single most common placement we see in customer photos, and it is common because it works.
Front porches are next, and they change the calculation slightly. A porch piece is public. Neighbors see it, the mail carrier sees it, and a hand painted front board with a family name reads like a sign. If that is not your speed, keep the paint work subtle and let the skis do the talking.
Indoors is more popular than you would guess. A ski chair in a basement bar, a snowboard bench in an entryway, a coffee table in a room with a wood stove. The exterior oil paint is happy indoors, it just never gets tested there. Check your doorways before you commit, since 36 inches of depth does not always negotiate a tight stairwell turn. There is a whole category of Indoor Decor and Furniture for exactly this.
Commercial spaces are the fourth. Lodge decks, shop entries, brewery patios, corporate lobbies in towns where everyone skis. This is where branded work comes in, and where the logo decal conversation above becomes relevant, since the client generally has a brand standard and a marketing person who will notice if the blue is off by a shade.
Care and Colorado Weather
These pieces are built to live outside, so the maintenance list is short. It is not empty.
Sun is the enemy, not water. Exterior oil paint handles rain, snow and freeze cycles without complaint, but ultraviolet light works on any finish over enough seasons, and at altitude there is more of it. If the chair sits in full southern exposure ten hours a day, expect the painted work to want attention sooner than a chair on a covered porch will. That is physics, not a defect.
Spring, wash it with mild soap and water and look at the paint in direct light for dull or chalky patches. Summer, wipe spills off the arm around the binding cup holder so nothing stains. Fall, clear leaves and pine needles out of the slats before they get wet and stay wet, because trapped organic material against wood is worse over three weeks than a hard rain is over a season.
Winter, leave it out. Genuinely. Snow on a ski chair is the most natural thing in the world and the piece is built for it. If you would rather store it, use a garage or a breathable cover. Do not shrink wrap it in plastic, because the condensation that traps against the wood does more harm than the weather you are hiding from.
The 3 year hassle free warranty covers the things that should not happen. Call, describe what went wrong, and we sort it out. We are a small shop in Manitou Springs, not a claims department, and the person who answers has probably touched your chair.
How to Actually Order One
The process is deliberately low tech, because personalized work does not survive a checkout form.
Call 303.775.7273 and describe what you have. How many pairs of skis, what condition, what the piece is for and who it is for. If you are shipping skis to us, we will tell you how to box them, which mostly means do not overthink it. If you are in Colorado, drop them off or ask about a pickup.
Then we talk design. Paint or no paint, a mural or a front board, a chair or a bench, standard or rocker. If you are going with painted work, expect a few questions about the place and the person, because that is where the good ideas come from. Two to four weeks in the shop after that, longer in the run up to Christmas, which is why the smart move is calling in September rather than December.
One logistics note people miss. If you are shipping your skis to us and want the finished chair shipped back, that return shipping is billed separately from the build. We say it up front so it is not a surprise on the invoice. Local delivery across Colorado is straightforward, and we ship nationwide to the lower 48.
If you want a piece before your skis can get here, or before a specific date, look at Ready to Ship. Those are finished and go out fast. Otherwise the Sentimental Ski Chair is where most people start, and it is our steadiest seller for a reason.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many pairs of skis do I need for one chair?
One Adirondack ski chair takes four to five pairs of your own skis, and a matching set of two chairs takes eight to ten pairs. Mismatched pairs are fine and often look better than a matched batch.
What if I do not have enough skis, or any at all?
Tell us the brand and era you want and we will source something close from our own stock. Plenty of chairs get built entirely from our skis when a customer wants the look without having the gear.
Can you paint my company logo on the chair?
A logo is never hand painted. It goes on as a logo decal floated onto a hand painted background, with aluminum or plastic appliques as alternatives, which keeps the mark exact. Branded pricing is quoted on a call at 303.775.7273.
How long does a personalized order take?
Most made to order work runs two to four weeks in the shop, longer in the weeks before Christmas. If you need something sooner, ask about ready to ship pieces.
How big is the finished chair and how much weight does it hold?
A standard Adirondack ski chair measures 45 inches tall by 36 inches deep by 32 inches wide, comfortable for people from 3 feet to 6 feet 10, with a 400 lb capacity and a 3 year warranty. Any chair converts to a rocker for $75 more on repurposed oak wine barrel slats.
Go look in the garage, count the pairs, and then call us at 303.775.7273 and tell us what you found. We will tell you honestly whether you have enough to build with, what it will cost and how long it will take. Start with the Sentimental Ski Chair, or browse the rest of the Sentimental collection to see what other people did with their pile.
