The Last Chance Cafe

Once the Diner Kitchen was complete, I had a terrible predicament. The attached dining room looked completely out of place and boring, and it wasn’t any fun hanging out there.

The previous owners let me keep the giant oak buffet hutch because it fit in the hole in the wall perfectly and they didn’t know what else would go there so easily. It was a lovely hutch but it didn’t go well with red cupboards!

First thing was first, we scrapped everything in the dining room and painted the walls warm white. Then we started looking for chrome chairs and a chrome table.

I’ll provide tutorials in the future for everything w did in the Last Chance Cafe and the Diner Kitchen- there’s a lot of great stuff in these two rooms and some of it required a lot of improvising since it was difficult to find any information on the internet. People aren’t spending a lot of time fixing up these things. We bought these hideously ugly chrome chairs off a moving company for $20 and it came with an equally ugly brown table. We were lucky though because I had a white table with a chrome lip, and the brown table had nice chrome legs. A simple leg transplant and the table was done!

The chairs were a bit harder, but my moms friend Lois is a master sewer, and with a bit of difficulty and $30 worth of red and white vinyl we had a lovely set. Lois even rolled the white leather over the old bead and made a rolled lip to go around the edge of the seats!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the other side of the buffet hutch there was now a gaping hole. I hung up a really funky Rock and Roll picture that we had in our basement at home for years, but I wasn’t sure what to do with that space until my boyfriend seen that a local Zellers was going out of business and selling off everything- including the equipment from their restaurant. With a little bit of haggling we dragged home this diner booth!

Mom got in on diner fever after that and brought down a chrome napkin dispenser and a Coca Cola glass straw holder with chrome top and red and white striped straws. We also had squeeze ketchup and mustard bottles, glass and chrome sugar dispensers and syrup dispensers, red napkins, and Coca Cola green glass cups.

There was just one more issue to address in the diner. That buffet hutch wasn’t working out too great, so we pulled it out and shipped it over to Mom’s where it looks great in her dining room. My boyfriend found a mini plastic Wurlitzer replica on the classified ads and I went over to buy it. While I was chatting with the seller, she invited me in to “see what we have in the basement.”

The basement was a veritable treasure trove of items! Pin ball machines, Pepsi vending machines, model cars, and other beautiful collectibles from the 50’s to 70’s. Best of all, they not only had a working juke box down there- they offered to sell it!

It’s a beautiful working 1962 Seaberg Juke Box, and came filled with 45’s. It has great artists like Elvis and Bruce Springstein, and we love listening to it while we are in the Diner. In this shot you can also see the popcorn bowl on the booth table, the restored bubble gum machine on the chrome table, and a couple Coke coolers. The cooler on the bottom is a 1964 Ideal cooler that used to have tracks inside where you would pick the bottles up by the neck and pull them through the runners. It was purchased for $50 from a metal recycler. The one on the top (the grey square) is an embossed 1954 Action Coca Cola cooler purchased at a car show/swap meet this summer. They are both currently being restored (more pictures later!)

The Diner is great, but we are still constantly putting the finishing touches on it. For example, we had a boring grey garbage can until mom found me this perfect shaped black one and I stickered it up to look like it belonged on a race track.  It’s now the coolest garbage can around. The people who sold us the juke box also gave us a set of Coca Cola salt and pepper shakers which look great in the booth.

The other day I was staring at the walls and decided they were a little plain. I went downstairs looking for some decoration and found a box of old records that were scratched and warped. They look great pinned to the wall around the juke box and tables!

I’ve also decided these records could be useful in the future for decorating and creating new funky dishes and more.

 

 

Other things I’m working on for the Last Chance Diner include a light up Open Sign, real menu’s, a record clock, a matching pantry, record bowls, and a record cake platter. If you want to keep reading about the 50’s Diner Kitchen, the Last Chance Cafe, and the Last Chance Garage, please Follow it on Word Press! I’ll be sharing the instructions for each project as I go along!