Sometimes a project goes exactly the way you think it will–but sometimes, not so much. My husband and I were at the Beech Mountain Ski Resort when we saw this repurposed lift chair for sale outside a shop.

At $175.00, it was a little pricey, but I decided it was exactly what we needed to go on the front porch of our newly-purchased house on Beech Mountain. I mean, why buy a traditional swing or some type of deck chair when we could have something as authentic as a repurposed ski lift chair? Something that used to take Beech Mountain skiers up the slopes?

We didn’t have a vehicle large enough to haul such a chair home that day, but a few weeks later, we arrived at Beech Mountain with the rented U-Haul we were using to move some stuff to the new house. After unloading, we had a big, empty trailer and were ready to go buy a ski lift chair for the porch.

This is when the project became a bit more complicated. We found out the chair isn’t sold the way it looks outside that ski shop. Oh no, we learned we were looking at the finished product. For $175, we could purchase a lift chair minus the legs or any kind of suspension system.

We should have thrown in the towel then, but I had become obsessed with having one of those chairs. We’ll figure something out, I told my husband.

We paid our money and were given directions to the lot where old ski lift chairs go to die. Pick any one you want, we were told. No resort employee went with us. We were on the honor system, I guess, to get only what we paid for.

Believe me, after we struggled to load one of these bad boys, we didn’t want another. Talk about heavy! I pictured the resort employee who sold us the chair back in her office laughing. There’s a sucker born every minute, I imagined her thinking.

Once we got our chosen lift chair home and out of the U-Haul, then we decided to haul it to its new home, the front porch. This involved going up a flight of front porch steps. There our lift chair currently resides (I won’t say “sits”).

I know; it doesn’t look like the one outside the ski shop. But there’s hope. We saw a ski lift chair in the neighborhood that someone has actually fixed and painted. Excuse the fuzzy picture; it was a foggy day on the mountain.

Last weekend, we chatted up a guy at the Banner Elk Wooly Worm Festival who does welding. He said for $150, he would come pick up our chair, weld some legs on it, and return it to the porch.

Pick it up, fix it, and bring it back? We’ll pull out the checkbook again. We don’t know how to weld, and we sure don’t want to lift that sucker again. I just won’t think about the original price plus what it’s going to cost to fix the darn thing so we can sit in it.

One day I hope to post a picture of our ski lift chair with legs. It might even be painted–by me. I can save that little bit of money.