Amazing Upholstery Adventure - the Finale

I never did post the final final of the chair I upholstered, with the very able and crucial help of my friend Rolando, who knows what he's doing! Good thing someone did!

Here it is, happily living in our dining room. As I mentioned at the beginning, it really is Wayne's grandfather's chair, and it was sad and in pretty bad shape before we took it all apart, fixed it, and made it beautiful again.

We are very happy with it! Thank you, Rolando!

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?