Armchair Reupholster

This is my first major furniture reupholster and it has been a long time in the making.  About three years ago back in wonderful South Pasadena (California) I was driving down the street with my husband and visiting brother and sister-in-law when we saw this beauty on the street corner (ooh-la-la) with a ‘for free’ sign on her seat.

I instantly fell in love and had to have her.  We came back from breakfast and she was still there, so we loaded her up somehow in the trunk of our little car and took her to her new home.

Where she sat in our garage for two years.  Then we moved her to her new home in ABQ.  Where she sat in the garage for another few months, suffering all sorts of injustices, such as being run into by the husband and breaking the arm.  After that incident I knew it was finally time to bring this beauty back to glory. 

I started way back in November, but I finally finished! Here she is boys:

Beautiful!  Wonderful!  I love how it turned out, and for my first time reupholstering, with surprisingly few mistakes.  Here’s a side by side so you can see the transformation:

Here is a blurry close up of the pattern, it is called rustic living.

I also painted the feet of the chair a bright blue for a nice pop of color.

It is the comfiest chair too!  Perfect to kick back and knit in.  Oh, how it has made me miss South Pas.  People there put out perfectly good free furniture out in the alleys all the time!  I have at least 5 other pieces of furniture I’ve saved and remade for my house that I found abandoned in alleys.  Folks in ABQ don’t seem to do that, or maybe I just don’t drive around enough.

But anyway, back to the chair.  I’m not going to give a step-by-step tutorial on furniture reupholster, because there are lots of tutorials already out there.  I will just share my tips and suggestions that I learned along the way.

Poor broken arm after the hit and run.

Tip #1: Take pictures of every single step!!!  This is the most important tip!  When you reupholster a chair, basically you are taking off the pieces of fabric, using those as templates to cut out new fabric, and then putting the new fabric back on in the same way.  If you don’t take pictures, you will quickly become confused on how to put it all back together.  Especially if you’re like me and you take three months from start to finish. 

Tip #2:  If you come across something unusual, write it out or take a video.  This goes along with tip #1, but this is for when you are pulling off fabric and all of a sudden you are confronted with a funky metal thing with sharp teeth, and you are thinking, “how the heck did this get on there?”  Slow down, and take notes on how that part fit together.  Because, trust me, you will not remember when it’s time to put it all back together.

Check out this video on You Tube to see how the metal teeth go back on the back frame of a chair.  This really helped me out.  It also made me really wish I had an power staple gun like the dude in the video.

Tip #3:  Take the whole chair apart.  If you are able to, unscrew everything and take the whole chair apart, like so:

I didn’t figure this out until after I had pulled all the old fabric off.  Would have made it much easier, and it would have been near impossible to get the new fabric on if I didn’t take it apart.  This also made it easier to fix that broken arm.

Tip #4:  Have a helper, preferably a big strong sexy man (or woman).  This is definitely a two person job.  When you are stapling the fabric back on it needs to be pulled taut so that the fabric lays nice and flat.  My husband helped me put the whole thing together, and it would not have looked so nice without his help.

Tip #5:  Have all the right supplies on hand.  Buy more fabric than you think you need, especially if you're a fool like me and you chose fabric with a specific pattern than could only go one way.  Have a staple gun and plenty of staples.  I reused all the cotton batting in my chair since it was still in good shape, but if yours is gross than have plenty of that on hand.  Most chairs will require some sewing as well to get the right shape.

Tip #6:  Patience!  Pulling out staples, putting in staples, messing up and starting over, cutting your fabric in the wrong orientation, running out of fabric and making an emergency trip to the fabric store praying the whole way they still have the same fabric in stock.  Yeah, fun stuff.  This isn’t an easy project, so if you’re wanting to take on a reupholster job, brace yourself for frustration.  Just take it slow, relax, and soon you’ll have an awesome new chair.

I think that’s all my tips.  This was a cool project to do, but it was a lot of work.  Hopefully some of these tips will help you out if you tackle a reupholster job!

And now it’s time to go relax and do some knitting in my awesome new chair!  Thanks for reading!

Old Dresser Redo

In my apartment in California I had a big, deep hallway closet full of shelves.  This was my craft closet and it fit everything perfectly.  But this new house only has one closet with shelves in it, and it is tiny.  Definitely not enough space for a fabric hoarder.  It’s enough for all my containers of loose supplies, but no room for my piles of fabric.   So I needed something more functional and cuter to store my fabrics in than boxes on the floor.  Cue the trip to the thrift store!

I found this beauty at Savers for only $30, but my $20 off coupon brought it down to $10, score!  It weighs a million pounds and had sticky drawers, but I loved how big and deep the drawers were, perfect for all my fabric! 

This post isn’t going to be a tutorial necessarily, since I am by no means an expert on furniture restoration.  This is more just to show what I did, and some of my tips and advice on what I learned from my inevitable mistakes. 

 

First I took out all the drawers and unscrewed all the brass handles on them.  The dresser had 9 drawers, but I decided to leave out the middle three drawer and the doors to make it like an open shelf.  I took off all the hardware for those drawers, but kept them because you never know when you’ll need a drawer slider.  (I will never need a drawer slider, yet keep it I shall.) 

Make sure to keep all your nuts and bolts and whatnots together, it is a pain in the neck to lose a screw that fits perfectly and have to hunt all over for another one the same size.

After cleaning out the drawers I lined them with some fun wrapping paper that I got at Party City.  I measured and cut it out to fit in the drawers, then Mod Podged it on.  As you can see, I didn’t quite measure right.

 

Yeah, big ugly gaps and creases in the paper, and a lazy me that didn’t feel like recutting and regluing it on.  So that drawer was designated to the be the seldom used junk drawer of the dresser.  Pretty soon I got the hang of it though and the rest of the drawers turned out pretty good.

 

Once they all had the paper in place I got them all nice and painted up.

When I painted them I thought that I would just paint along the top of the paper at the edge with my nice steady hand.  Except that I don’t have a nice steady hand and instead got paint everywhere and a sorry excuse for a straight line.  So, to hide my mess I glued some ribbon to the top of the drawers and also down the edges to hide some spots where there paper didn’t meet nicely.  It turned out rather lovely.

 

 

Now onto the main body of the dresser.  I didn't sand off the old finish, and I know that this will cause my paint to easily scratch off in the future, but that's not a bother to me.  I got the same color paint (Martha Stewart paint called Winter’s Day) in both matte and glossy.  I used the matte paint for the main body and used the glossy paint for accents.  The glossy paint gives it a subtle contrast, rather than the glaring one I was originally thinking of (I almost went with a metallic paint for the accents, glad I didn’t).  To add some dimension and visual delight to the dresser I glued on some molding to the top.  I got this vine molding at Michaels.

 

I used Gorilla Glue to glue it down, and once again I didn’t read the directions before using this glue.  It expands while it sets, so you only need to use a tiny bit.  Yeah, I used a bunch and the glue oozed out everywhere.  I sanded off the excess glue, but it was a pain.  Next time I will remember!

I painted the molding in the glossy paint, here’s an upclose to see the detail, I love how it turned out.

 

I also used the glossy paint to paint around the front edges of the dresser.  Remember how I said I was making three drawer spaces open shelves?  To make them even prettier I glued down some cute scrapbook paper.  And by this time I had run out of Mod Podge and was too lazy to go to the store, so I watered down some Elmer’s glue and it worked just fine.

 

And while I was taking the above pic, I went ahead and knocked over my whole can of glossy paint that I had left sitting open by my feet.  Good job me! 

 

But, it didn’t go to waste!  I used the puddle to paint the brass drawer handles.

 

Waste not want not, right.  After 2 coats of glossy paint on the edges and the drawer handles screwed back on, I was done! 

We hauled that heavy beast upstairs where I added some finishing touches.

 

I spray painted some wicker baskets to hold my yarn.  The basket on top holds the supplies for my upcoming projects.  When I can easily see what projects I have to do I get more excited to do them.  That helps to combate my procrastination tendencies.

 

And of course, drawers full of beautiful fabric!

 

And finished!  It turned out great, especially for my first furniture redo.

Now, what did I learn and what would I do differently next time?  I would take the time to make a checklist and be sure that I had all my supplies ahead of time, like more Mod Podge, tarps to lay down, painters tape, the little things you don’t think of until you need.  I would make sure that the dresser was structurally sound before painting it.  I knew the drawers were sticky but I thought it wasn’t a big deal so I didn’t sand them down.  After a couple coats of paint they are thicker and stick even more now.  Eventually I’ll go back and sand them down, but that seems like too much work now!  I also would have painted the inside of the drawers before adding my paper so that the gaps wouldn’t be as noticeable.

This little area is now my favorite spot in the house!  Thanks for reading!