Before and Clouds

Before
This is one of our six dining chairs, a set we bought four years ago. We bought them second-hand. Not because we loved them, but because we were sad renters, with broken chairs, and no place to take a family meal, all seated (safely) together. But, hey... not bad, right? And we've enjoyed sitting 'round the family table, building, painting, making, soldering, gluing, and eating, too.

Time and use are good, but together with all the good comes some wear and tear, some abuse, and these chairs show it. This is one of the nice ones. Time for a new cover. Time to put our sweet skills to work, and replace the fabric on our seats.
Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

And so, like a perky blogger, I bring you a decorator's Before and After!

Super neato: we hardly had to do a thing to remove the seats from the frames, because some of them are completely loose, and the rest are hanging on by barely threaded screws, and twisted brackets. What can I say, we live dangerously.

For the record: this project was initiated by Natalie, the Chickenblogger, September 7, 2012. Sober. Intent. Earnest. I recruited the first child to wander by... this honor fell to Alex. Skilled. Resourceful. A visionary man. Mission: remove two seats, strip them of their fabric, assess their condition, take measurements, and then shop for new fabric, possibly foam, hopefully not plywood.

We were well into step one: remove seats, when we made multiple discoveries, including:
1. each seat had four separate rows of staples, a plethora of staples (thank you 1984 SAT for enriching my vocabulary, so worth it). Somebody in the chair factory must have worked by a staple-use commission, because they were imbedded, forty-two staples per linear inch.

2. popping out staples is boring. Just saying.

Don't get me wrong. I can handle manual labor, and honest, the first thirty seconds of this task were _fascinating_ No doubt about it, we were in this for the long haul. Unfortunately, each new level presented another freakin' defensive barrier of staple hell.

Uh-oh. My cool is waning.

Okay. Not only was I losing my cool, but I should have had the sense to do more than listen to Alex. I should have listened and followed his wisdom. My hope was that we only needed to replace the upholstery, and we could keep the foam, and the wood seat. Which... duh why would nasty-stained-abused fabric possibly be hiding sweet and wonderful foam?

Alex said, "Let's just cut the fabric off, save the wood as a template and start from scratch!"

Natalie, the Chickenblogger said, "Golly. Gee. We're fine. Let's keep going in this mindless, sweaty, pointless, bodily injuring pursuit, until we lose sight of our purpose, and abandon all hope of ever finding peace." I felt pretty sure we were on a good path.

After
Yeah. This is the next picture on the memory card.

For the record: we have four dirty, semi-unstable chairs, and two chair frames with no seats. The foam pads are gross, the wood seats are warped, and need to be replaced.

And this concludes today's post.

Thank you.

Happy Wednesday!