Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Journey of a Chair

When we first moved into our house, in 2000, we didn't have enough furniture for there to be some in every room. Entire closets were completely empty...we just didn't have enough stuff to put in them. We had one couch, which was in our family room. We had beds. We had a kitchen table with chairs.

Quite a few neighbors came over to welcome us, and we had them sitting in our living room on kitchen chairs, a piano bench, and a lawn chair. I had determined that I was not going to fill that room until I had the means to do it right. I pictured a couch and two great chairs.

Our Bishop at the time had heard that we were furniture-less and offered us money to go buy a couch at the local thrift shop. No, thank you, we told him.

Fast forward to 2008....I now had a couch for the living room, and closets stuffed to capacity. What i didn't have was the 2 chairs I'd always dreamed would accompany my couch. we were broke, and so began perusing classifieds for 'previously owned' chairs. (Sounds so much more sophisticated than, 'old crap') We finally found two beautiful wing back chairs in a lovely yellow and green striped material (Picture to the right shows original chair material and sleeping daughter...hopefully she doesn't mind). We had seen similar chairs retail for over $800 a piece and here were these being given away at $150 for both! We called, jumped in the car (ok, it was a Previa, but I hated that thing and don't like to admit to it) and drove about 20 minutes to the home of the lady with the chairs.

Her taste in furniture was....interesting. Her home was....well, expensively done is one way of nicely saying she had no taste and spent a LOT of money proving it...:)  She thought the chairs were old and grandmotherly. We bought them. Blair packed them into the Blue Bean and we carted them home. They looked great!

In 2009, in the early hours of a Sunday morning, our son Timothy cut his lip and climbed onto a chair. We were still in bed, but could hear him happily playing in the living room. When we got up and went into the living room, it looked like a crime scene! The chairs, more one than the other, were COVERED in blood. A little blood and a lot of saliva go a very LONG way. (We did not take pictures)
Most of the blood came out, but the chairs were not designed to stand up to that sort of disaster and the material had now sustained water damage that no amount of cleaning would fix.

I decided to reupholster the chairs. Turns out, I loved it! New hobby I am crazy about! I only had time to do the worst chair quickly and the other one had to wait about 6 months. They look great and have a fringe around the bottom. Which the cat hates....or loves...either way, he has eaten/shredded/mutilated quite a bit of it and I just spent my morning replacing it. Of course, now the couch, it being 11 years later, is done. I'm dying to reupholster it, put it downstairs to replace the flood couch and buy a new couch for the living room.   Of course, by the time I get all this done, something else will have happened to the chairs...and then there's the piano which has had most of the varnish chewed off of one side....

2 comments:

Gingersnapped! said...

I will PAY YOU MONEY to re-upholster MY wing chair!!! (I'm SERIOUS!!!!) Or I will pay you money to mentor/educate me on how to re-upholster my wing chair. (Either way $$$ for YOU!!!)

Maren said...

Absolutely! Either way, upholstering is fun fun fun!:) I would be ecstatic to either do it or help.