I wish I had taken before and after photos of my process with this chair. I started almost a year ago (long before I started this blog) and got discouraged and left it in the garage covered up.

To start the story I have always wanted to learn how to reupholster furniture. After looking for classes near where I live and not finding anything, a friend of a friend was hired to teach me the basics. Getting together became harder and working on the chair was infrequent not to mention all the issues with this chair.
I purchased the chair from a thrift store in case I really messed up I wouldn’t have a lot of money invested in the chair. I sat in it and wiggled it around to see if the frame was okay. Brought the ugliest chair in the world home and started taking off the fabric, batting and foam. The frame was not usable. It was falling apart and not really salvageable so I decided to make my own frame. It can’t be that hard, right? One hundred dollars of hardwood later I had a chair frame. Ouch, I will not complain about the price of used furniture again.Now to start the upholstery process. Needed foam and batting, $$$, fabric, $$$, bought a pneumatic staple gun and staples, $$$, and other assorted items and tools.

I used webbing and springs to build the chair and then started applying the foam and batting. Going pretty well at this point. Now on to the fabric. There are two seams on the inside back of the chair. They were uneven and I gave up at that point and covered the chair up.

Now almost a year later my guilt of spending so much on that dang chair got the best of me. I decided that if I couldn’t fix the seam problem I would camouflage the problem, hence the upholstery webbing accent. I carried the webbing down the back even though there are no uneven seams to cover up. I sewed a small lumbar pillow accenting it with the upholstery webbing. The chair is not perfect but it is DONE. To most people this would have cured them from ever trying to reupholster anything ever again. This is where some of my personality flaws come in, stubbornness and the ability to cuss like a sailor at this chair. I tackled easier projects while this chair sat in the garage waiting to get finished or burned in the trash. The latter choice was considered heavily. I needed to look at this experience with open eyes, to see it for the positive that came out of this, I learned how to build a chair from the ground up. I am not afraid to tackle more projects now. Future projects will probably not be perfect and also give me hard lessons to learn, but that is the process, learning.

11 May This entry was published on May 11, 2014 at 7:54 pm. It’s filed under DIY, Re-purpose, Re-purpose Gallery and tagged barrel chair, Chair, fabric, furniture, jug lamp, reupholster, upholstery. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.