I'm back...

Wow, sure has been a while!! I've been busy working at Starbucks here in Oakland, along with little jobs walking a dog, editing reports for a local psychologist, babysitting, and soon reffing lacrosse!
So not much is new on the furn front... but here are some of the latest photos anyhow :)

This 1950's "gossip bench" will be redone in a bright bold fabric, probably from Ikea for economy's sake... have to decide if i'll paint the wood part or sand it down to a natural finish...









This BEAUTIFUL teak midcentury modern hutch needs no work whatsoever -- and it was just $60 on craigslist!!! I had planned on turning it around to make some cash, but it looks so perfect in my dining room.... so it's staying!


And here I am working on the TV cabinet on my porch.... it has since been entirely sanded, and the front has been masking-taped --- i'll be cutting out the image of a tree and then staining around it, so the tree shows through in the natural wood!! just have to find the time (and motivation) to finish before Steve freaks out that i'm taking forever!!!! Too many projects....

Lovely Danish Table

I picked up this cute table in Los Altos, which was a minor hike from Oakland, but do-able since the table was only $50.

Perk of all perks -- when I arrived, I saw that the table was not only just as cute as the photos (i love the fold-to-store leaf! and rounded square corners!), it's Danish (big ol' denmark stamp on the bottom) and the wood is teak. Love it!

The down side is that the two sides of the top (not the leaf section) showed definite signs of use, the teak had obviously not been well cared for (the legs were starting to gray from not being oiled and possibly getting wet outside?), and the underside was really dirty, as if the table had been left out in the rain.

Though the table top and legs would probably benefit most from a full sand and refinish, i figured a good-enough fix would just be to give it a good rub down with teak oil. Outfitted with latex gloves and a straggler sock that ended up in our laundry last week, I oiled it up good -- and the results were worth it! The teak is GLOWING and looks lovely with the turquoise modernica chairs I convinced Steve to help me invest it.... ;)

Up next -- we're busy sanding the sides of the 1950's TV cabinet in one of the previous posts. I have to do some research into how to match the finish, or figure out another creative way to preserve the wood and make it look gorgeous again!

New New New

A new home, a new project. Or four.....
I've been in Oakland for two weeks now after driving from Portland, ME to move in with my boyfriend, who's going to school in San Fran. Part of my plan here is to continue rehabbing furniture, both to furnish the new place and maybe to sell (we've also been picking up cheap antiques on CraigsList and at Salvo to resell on CL, thus funding what may be a neverending cycle of furniture.... we'll see).
I've found a few things to work on, including a couple of interesting chairs (who are waiting for perfect fabric before being featured here), a kickass 1970's couch (which might eventually be reupholstered, when I'm feeling REALLY motivated), and - find of all finds - a 1952 TV/Radio/Record player (free on CL!!). (both of these photos were in the CL listings - that isn't my apartment).

As I type, four $2 Lowe's sofa legs (in a cool midcentury modern style) are waiting for stain to dry so I can varnish them, and I'm psyching myself up for sanding and refinishing the TV cabinet. Steve helped me take the old (unworking) tube out, which will soon be replaced by his little plasma tv!

The doors and top are going to need some serious sanding, I'm hoping I can match the dark stain so I don't have to sand the whole thing down... but we'll see. It might be easier just to refinish the whole exterior and make repairs to the interior. The record player drawer will hopefully become DVD storage, and I've been told the radio still works.... :)

I've got a few furn adventures ahead of me!

Before and After

Finished!

It's been a while since I posted... but I've been working on the chair all week.

The first task: covering buttons. Thirteen of them.

You can kind of get a general sense for what my apartment has looked like during this process in this photo....

this is my tiny little dining room table covered in upholstery supplies and tools : hammer, staple gun, fabric, (cell phone), and the button covering kit I picked up at Jo-Anne Fabrics. It's pretty neat, actually -- you put the fabric circle and button top into this little plastic dish, then use another plastic piece (and the flat side of the a staple gun, in my case) to push the back on. When all is said and done, you have:

BUTTONS! I thought about trying to match the pattern up to where the button would be on the chair, but instead just made a variety, in hopes that I could at least match some of them closely enough that I didn't have a white button in the middle of a big green flower. And somehow, I actually did pretty well! The patterns aren't exacty, but the ratio of color on the button to color at it's placement is generally pretty good. :) I'm just that fantastic :) haha.




But threading buttons was interesting... good thing I picked up some giant needles while I was at Jo-Anne!!!


After all the buttons were threaded, I pulled the back and seat fabric taut and busted out my new friend, the staple gun (which isn't QUITE powerful enough to put staples all the way into the hardwood frame, so I kept a hammer handy at all times).


So with the entire inside upholstered, it was time to bring out my pewter-finished tacks...... and let me tell you, those things SUCK.



Ok, I lied. They're pretty awesome, but it's a lot harder than you'd think to get those effers perfectly lined up, while also getting gimp (this curly ribbon kind of stuff to cover the edge of the fabric) to actually cover the edge of the fabric.
Although it looks fine from afar, a professional upholsterer would probably be appalled by my tacking skills!!!

I had to put on the side batting and fabric as well halfway through tacking, since they needed to be tacked in as well.... this whole upholstery thing is getting easier, I think.

OK, I lied again, because the absolute trickiest part of this WHOLE project is putting on the final piece -- the back. There's these metal bars with nails in them that I had to re-use from the old upholstery -- i had to straighten out a few tacks and get the bars nails into the fabric in exactly the right place so that it stretched right across the back... plus I had to staple the top of the fabric in kind of upsidedown -- and the curves made it hard to get it right.
The back piece is FAR from perfect -- the only real success was that I managed to keep rust residue from staining the new fabric orange. But it looks alright and does the trick.
Last thing to do was stretch a peice of fabric to cover my chair's girly parts (ie, springs and burlap which shed dust and lord-knows-what when you sit on the chair). Cheap muslin did the trick pretty well (since I couldn't find cambric, which is traditionally used for this purpose.)

(as an aside, i struck nearly the same pose at the doc office today...... had to get a colposcopy after an abnormal pap smear :( not so much fun. finishing the chair -- despite the frustrating back peice -- was the highlight of my day)





AND SO WE HAVE:

A beautiful, finished green and white and wood chair.

Yay!!!!!!!

But of course......

now I need an ottoman to match.....


;)

a naked chair (and 11 cents)

After letting the chair sit in my living room for a couple weeks, I finally found the time and energy to attack all those staples....

Got home from the rock gym Sunday at 4 (after 4 hours of climbing, so my arms were already a bit sore...) and worked until midnight, stripping staples, nails, burlap, and cambric.

The fruits of my labor?
- one naked chair
- a million and a half staples in a metal mixing bowl.
- a pile of fabric templates, buttons, and excess batting.
- 11 cents.
- one playmobile rifle and assorted broken toy parts whose original form is unknown.

Watch my chair strip:

Taking the back off was the first step... and interesting because there are metal strips on the side that are nailed down, which makes it look smoother and more even when the fabric is in place. HOPE i can duplicate that!

Under the back fabric was a sheet of batting and burlap to cover all those puffs of batting you see here, which are keeping the buttons in place (i'll have to learn how to tie this knot):

Which won't be too hard, now that i've documented it with photos!! I took a bunch of photos along the way when something was especially complicated... and took lots of notes, hoping i'll actually be able to put this thing back together again!!!
At the time, this was the most interesting piece to remove, because of all the button threads!! Next was the seat -- pretty easy -- but then came the arms.... which were actually put on before a lot of the batting was. I didn't want to strip batting away, since i'm keeping the original batting and foam (and horsehair? there's something funky, black, and coarse/hairy under there), so I ripped it off, and will have to figure out how to put new fabric on so that it works without going down to the bones of my chair!

Maybe it's just me, but I think there's something very sexy about this leg :) hahaha, maybe because it's about to get NEKID!



Yay naked chair. Next up : cutting fabric and stapling it on. I THINK the hard part is over.

not enough tools.

I thought I was ready.... spread an old sheet across my living room floor so I could keep the mess confined (and moveable), found a few flathead screwdrivers of varying thicknesses to pry off the finishing tacks, and went to work.

Let me tell you, tacks are the easy part. (Although it would have been LOADS easier with one of these) --->


BUT.... there's only so much I can do. Or afford.


Once I started taking out tacks, I realized that underneath all those tacks were STAPLES. ie, pure evil. Like I said, tacks are the easy part. I drove all around town searching for one of these:

But... nobody carries them! Not anything like them!! Lowes had a bigger thing for prying nails, but there was no way it was going to get under my little staples :(




Here's my last tack.... kind of a bittersweet moment as I realized that while one step was finished, an awfully big one was about to begin....