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!!