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....

The ugly orange chair

1. I've been wanting to try reupholstering something for a while now -- when I moved into my new apartment, I was trying to find cheap, creative ways to decorate, and stumbled across Design*Sponge, which has heaps of really fun before&after's of chairs and other furniture. All I needed was a chair....

2. I work part time. Which sucks. I love my job (reporter for The Forecaster), but it leaves me with lots free time. But also an awkward schedule for finding job #2. I was in need of a project.

3. In Minnesota with the fam for Christmas, I started scouring Craigslist Maine and New Hampshire for free or very cheap furniture. I emailed a bunch of people with redeemable chairs and couches, and finally got an email that wasn't an 'already-taken.' Ugly orange chair. Portsmouth, NH. Somehow convinced Andrew and his Subaru to go for a ride... (in exchange for the round trip from Portland to Portsmouth, which included getting lost at least twice, he got pizza and beer at Gaslight, which came highly recommended from Lori and her NH friends. I think he was happy.


Voila- Sarah has a chair --------->


Then I found an awesome fabric store online that sells CHEAP upholstery fabric, they had a few green+white prints that I really liked, I went with Braemore's 'Shadow Branches.'





Bought pewter-finish tacks on eBay, a staple gun from Target.... And I'm ready to go!