The second flight of stairs

My son Arthur and grandson Jack were here visiting last week. That time just flew by! But while they were here, Arthur helped me with two projects I've been meaning to do. One, he cut back a lot of the dead wood and "suckers" out of the trees and bushes in front of our house. I love the way it looks now! And I'm going to plant a succulent garden there - beautiful and drought-resistant. Arthur loves succulents and he inspired me. He has a greenhouse full of them at his home in Portland. We went for walks in my neighborhood while he was here and saw many yards full of beautiful succulents. It makes perfect sense in our perpetual drought situation.

     The other project he got me started on was the second half of our stairs going up to the second story. Wayne and I had taken the carpet off the lower half long ago, and had sanded and more-or-less finished the steps and landing nicely. But we left the carpet on the second half of the stairs "for later". Funny how longer "later" can be! Here was the first half.

     Arthur and I stripped that dirty old carpet and its underlayer off, and he got all the nails and boards and staples out too. Of course, like the first half, the treads and risers are covered in a yucky brown and fully leaded paint. Who knows why? And it's worn, so people must have walked on it for a long time "as is". Ghastly.
 
We don't like to sand leaded paint in the house, and I don't like wearing that big mask to avoid breathing in all that lead. So I am stripping the stairs of the lead paint before sanding. And I'm using a safer stripper so I don't have to wear a mask at all. The kind I'm using is called Citristrip, and it works very well. It has to stay on about 30 to 45 minutes, and then you scrape it and the paint off. I have to use a wire brush on the treads because the wood grain is grooved and there's paint in them thar' grooves. Still, it works and it doesn't eat your hands or poison you. Here's what I've done so far. More tomorrow.
     When the stripping is finished and the sanding is done, we plan to varnish and seal the steps. They don't really need to be stained as they're quite a nice color. Can't wait to have beautiful stairs!
     It sure was fun having Arthur and Jack here, and not just because they "helped". Now I miss them, of course!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure # 3

Just because I haven't written recently about the chair I'm upholstering (with the help - I should say he's doing most of the work, I'm learning - of my Upholstery Guru Rolando), doesn't mean there hasn't been progress. You would hardly recognize Wayne's grandfather's chair. Here are some recent photos:







                              The chair in its underwear:





The chair getting dressed:






 Here's Rolando adding yet more stuffing, even over the underwear. This chair is going to be a nap magnet!!









Here's the chair with half its dress on. Oh my, it's going to be beautiful!

Amazing Upholstery Adventure #2: The naked chair

We finished the first posting of the AUA (Amazing Upholstery Adventure) halfway through deconstruction. Of course, I finally succeeded in stripping all layers of the old upholstery and padding off the chair. In doing so I learned several important things:

• You find various levels of expertise when you deconstruct a chair that has been upholstered and re-upholstered. In my case the top-most layer was done by someone who was not an expert. Although I'm sure it looked good enough - after all it was used for years that way - it was not well done. The upholsterer put the new stuff right over a lot of the old stuff and didn't really know how to nail properly. Many nails were in crooked and/or misplaced on top of one another. They were hard to get out!

• The second (bottom) layer of my chair's upholstery was done by a master. Every nail was placed just as it should be. All the parts that hadn't decayed were intact and I paid close attention to how they were done. When someone years in the future pulls apart the upholstery I'm doing right now, I hope they feel the respect I felt for this person, probably living in the 1800s, who did this expert and careful work. I can only hope mine will be nearly as good.

• I would much rather be using a staple gun, as we do today, than hammering nails, as they did when both the first and the subsequent upholstering were done in the past. What a lot of work! So many nails, and having to pound each one in! Did I mention in the last post - there were hundreds of nails?!

• The original nails used in the first (the expert) upholstery were irregularly shaped, and I believe they were hand-forged. This makes the chair a bit older that we thought, maybe 1860s to 1870s. After all it was Wayne's grandfather's chair, and Wayne's mother was born in 1901, so her father could easily have bought the chair in the 1800s. It may have even been in the family before that. We don't know, but wish we did.

If I was going to spend the money to have a chair upholstered by a professional upholsterer, I would take all the old upholstery off it myself first. This is so much work, it's easy to see why it costs so much to have professional upholstery done. It makes sense that you'd save a lot of money by doing this part yourself.

Here's our chair, naked at last!! What's next in this Adventure?

Amazing Upholstery Adventure 101: Deconstruction!

My friend Rolando, who is a professional upholsterer as well as a fellow-bartender, has agreed to teach me how to upholster a chair. I am totally excited - I've always wanted to learn this skill. It all seems mysterious and difficult - obviously that's why it is so expensive to have someone else do it!

Our project is Wayne's grandfather's chair, a nice old wood armchair whose green damask upholstery is in sad shape. For years, the chair has stood in our bedroom covered with a throw. Now it's going to be liberated!! And beautified! Rolando says it will be easy - we'll see.

My first assignment has been to strip all the old upholstery off the chair. I had no idea how much was involved in this assignment, or how much I would learn from it. First thing I noticed was that hundreds of nails were used in upholstering our chair, and hundreds of nails had to be removed in order to strip it. Literally hundreds! Here's a photo of the seat in deconstruction - that's where I started.

And here's the seat with most of the (broken) webbing off. If you look closely, you can see another piece of broken webbing hanging down behind the right front chair leg. On this seat there was webbing on both the bottom and the top of the burlap cover. Apparently the upholsterer of the green damask left the original webbing underneath and just added new webbing on top.

I learned during this phase of the project that it is always better to remove all the old bits of everything when re-upholstering. Old webbing, for instance, disintegrates over time, although new webbing may last forever because of updated materials. Most chairs you will re-upholster have old webbing, but how can you be sure? Take it all off! All old chairs have cotton stuffing with the potential for bacteria and other undesirables in it. How can you be sure? Take it all off!

More to follow on My Amazing Upholstery Adventure soon!!

One small victory

I've been so annoyed with my dining room floor for the past year or so, or maybe it's better to say I've been annoyed with the way my floor looks. After all, it's not the floor's fault or the dining room's fault. It's actually my fault as I failed to pay attention and communicate clearly with a woman who, with all good intention I'm sure, used to clean my home for me.

A year ago or so, I noticed my dining room floor looked very worn in certain high-traffic places. Or was it just dirty? I washed it of course, and nothing changed. Would I have to have the hardwood floors re-done? Oh I certainly hoped not, because then I would have to have the floors done throughout the whole first level of my house.  Not only would it be expensive but it would be a big pain to have to move all the furniture somewhere else for several days and not to be able to use the house. I hated to think about it, so I tried to ignore it. Here's how it's been looking - yuck.

It got worse, of course, and then one day about four months ago I ran my new steam cleaner over the part near the kitchen door and some of it came up. Underneath I could see unharmed hardwood. Oh glory, it didn't need to be re-done. But how to get all this up? What could it be, it was so dirty and yet regular washing wouldn't clean it? Suddenly I realized it was wax - layers and layers of wax, and probably applied over an already dirty floor.

That's when I remembered this floor wax that I had bought for my former housecleaner to use. It was an industrial strength wood cleaner and wax, and seemed like a great thing. Unless, that is, you used it too many times and that's what had happened. She (we) used it for years.

Until yesterday my floor sat there in its sad state, making me feel like a terrible steward of my home.

Yesterday I was steam cleaning the kitchen linoleum when I thoughtlessly put the steamer down on the dining room floor for a few minutes while I answered the door. When I came back the steamer seemed stuck to the floor. When I finally pushed it forward, all the wax came off that spot along with the dirt under it and we had a perfectly clean wood floor - in need of wax, but never mind that. Yippee!

I got all the chairs up on the dining room table and otherwise cleared the floor as much as possible. In an hour or so I had most of that old wax up. It looks great! Now I'm going to research the best wax to use and I'm never going to let more than one layer pile up again! Can't wait to show off my floor!