Tool Time!

Happy weekend, everyone!  I hope all of our friends in the northeast are safe & sound (and staying warm!)

It's been insanely warm here, so much so that Noel & I have been marking things off our To Do list.

Now that Noel and I are homeowners, we get to spend some quality time doing things to improve our little homestead.  I've rented so long, it's funny that I sometimes forget we can change things on the house if we want!

So here are some projects we've taken on lately.  I'd just like to give a shout out to our new internet provider, because I was able to upload all of the following photos in, seriously, 10 seconds.  AMAZING.

On to projects!  So we bought a green bench years ago, and it was in great shape.

For a while.
 

 

How could this kind of damage happen to a perfectly innocent bench, you ask?

 

Do you even need to ask?

 

 

When the cats decided to destroy this particular piece of furniture, they were...thorough.

 

Please note that Sammy has a foot stuck in the hole.  After he had torn it away enough to smoosh himself into the lining, he used to lay inside it, like some kind of tattered hammock. 

 

So here was our quick fix.  I didn't feel like reupholstering the whole thing right now, so I took some twine and made some creative patches over the torn parts.  I also touched up the finish on the legs.  It's...well, unique.  I'm not 100% in love with it, but at least the cats can't destroy it.  Funny thing is, I used twine so that if they wanted to scratch on it, they'd at least scratch on the parts that felt like a scratching post.  But I was wrong.  They avoid it now like the plague.  *shrug*

Noel has a workshop in the garage.  When we bought the house, it had a HUGE wooden work table that took up a lot of space and frankly wasn't very useful - it was so deep that he wasn't able to use the majority of it.  So: Brilliant Idea!  It's our table, let's cut it in half and make an L shape!

Here's the original table:

 

We spent several hours sawing, drilling & hammering.  Here is his new workspace (he also put up new fluorescent lights to make it brighter.  It's a really nice (and roomy!) workspace now!

Note that there is yet another project on the sawhorses in the picture above.

It's a plain white divider wall that hides our water heater.  It is ucky. 

 

And guess what?  We own it!  So we can change it!  We found this awesome textured wallpaper at the home improvement store.  It has the glue already on the back, you just have to soak it to activate the glue and then put it in place:

 

Then you trim the excess off and let the paper dry completely:

 

After the paper dried for 24 hours, we painted it to match our front door.  It took several coats (red usually does):

 

 

But how awesome does THIS look now!?  (We added a 3rd piece we found in the garage):

 

 

Here's a closeup of the texture.  Isn't it awesome?

 

 

Yet another project?  We've done several outside ones.  One is a shed we built in the corner of the yard, to house the mower and make Noel's workshop even roomier!

 

The other big outside project?  A new garden!  Yes, I finally took pictures of it.  Does this not look like we have multiple dead bodies buried out there?

 

 

For those of you who think it might be too early to plant a garden, look!  The baby radishes are already coming up!

 

 

Even our lantanas are blooming already!

 

So that's an update on all the exciting domestic things we've been working on.  It's a good thing too - it's supposed to rain tomorrow. 

Blast From the Past

Remember this?

Seeing as how much we've moved this chair from state to state and have NOT worked on it in the past several years, we apparently didn't. 

However, we're in that kinda painful phase of the home purchasing process where we're stuck just waiting for the underwriting to be done.  For those of you who may not know, Noel and I are not exactly the most patient people in the world.  Ergo, this whole thing of "Hurry up and get us your bank statements and now....sit there and wait on other people to finish,"  we're not having an easy time. 

So we've already started packing!  Do we have a closing date yet?  Not so much.  But.  We're being proactive!  And also we're getting rid of a bunch of old junk like allergy medicine from 2009.  Nice. 

Also, to Barb's comment via email:  yes, it is a little wild that we gypsy souls are actually buying a home and settling in!  We like it here though, and figure that if we decide to travel for any long period of time again, at least we won't have to move our furniture into storage!  :)  Because seriously?  I am SICK of moving this furniture.  We've moved it, what...3 times in the past 2 years?  Too much.

So anyway, back to the chair.

This was a chair that used to look like this:

It was an $8 Goodwill find, complete with gorgeous Golden Girls-esque Miami pastel upholstery.

And mold under the seat cushion.  Don't forget that!  So how does one reupholster a chair?  Well, for this particular one, we used a lot of disinfectant.  Gross. 

We took off the upholstery very slowly and carefully.  Why?  Because the old pattern pieces are used as the pattern for your new fabric!  So go slowly, pull out the staples, and don't rip fabric. 

Here are the pieces once removed from the chair:

Oh, and one other VERY important thing:  make sure to label the pieces as you take them off!  When you cut the new fabric, you'll label it as well.  This seriously saved us as we finally pulled this poor chair out of the garage and were able to figure out which piece went where, even though it had been years since we had looked at it!

We used crushed velvet for this chair.  Be sure when cutting your fabric that you lay out the pieces so the nap (the grain, so to speak) of the fabric is facing the same way on all the pieces.  Velvet in particular will show as darker or lighter depending on whether it's turned one way or the other.  It may not make much of a difference until you get the pieces beside each other, and then it's really obvioius.

I also labeled which way was up, for the same reason! 

So here is the nekkid chair, sans upholster and mold.

(Needless to say, we disinfected the fool out of this chair, because we're reusing the padding)

Another thing I can suggest when taking the upholstery off is taking tons of pictures as you go.  These will be super helpful when you're putting it back together.  You may also want to take detailed notes, because you'll be putting the chair back together the same way it was originally put together (which is often the reverse of the way you took it apart).



So here it is with the seat and one arm put back on.  Most of the time, you use a lot of staples and pull the fabric taut (but not so tight that the fabric is going to tear when you sit on it!) and staple it to the wooden part of the frame.

Please note, this is the point where we put the chair in storage.  The fabric pieces went into a bag and into the sewing closet. 

And now we come to present day, when we sit at home packing up stuff and wondering what we can do to keep ourselves occupied while we wait for the closing.  And so we said "why not reupholster some furniture?"  Because 'going for a walk' or 'eating a pizza' is just way too easy.

I took some detail pictures just to give you an idea of how these things go together.  This is a picture of the outside arm.   You can see the front of the arm here, along with the contrast piping.  See how many staples we used?  We attached the velvet part first, then stapled the piping on.  Once the outside piece goes on over it, you won't be able to see the staples.

The black at the bottom is sewn to the velvet that goes over the front of the lower part of the chair.  We used black cotton to save on velvet costs, and also because it won't rub the seat cushion velvet as much. 

You'll also see that the velvet that's stapled has lots of cuts in it.  You have to have faith in yourself and do these cuts, often during the pre-staple stage, to get the fabric to lay right.  If I didn't do these cuts here, the fabric would never lay flat across that curve in the frame.  This part is seriously scary, making cuts, especially when you don't have any velvet left (like us).

In this picture, you can see that we've gotten both arms and the wings done.  Major progress!  I was pleased that it only took me 2 hours, working by myself, to get from the storage stage to here. 

The fabric on the arms and wings were pulled through the frame and stapled to the back wooden part of the frame.

I then took the piece that goes over the big yellow foam piece there, and stapled it on to the same part of the frame, between the frame piece and where the wing was stapled on.  Then I simply pulled it over the top, pulling it snug and smooth, and stapled it to the back frame.

See how it overlaps on the top and hides any staples?

Nifty!

I'm glad to say that with only a few minor exceptions (small pieces I want to hand sew together), this chair is actually finished!  I'll take some additional pictures to show you what it looks like completed.  We're very pleased with it!  It has a cushion piped in the same contrast trim, and just to make it look more modern, we painted the legs a high gloss black lacquer.

Now if this weren't enough, we decided to seriously overachieve and reupholster our gold Victorian couch as well.  Woo hoo!  Noel stripped it yesterday down to the frame and the seat foam, and he painted the frame high gloss black lacquer as well.  We're going to reupholster it in gray velvet.  Swanky!

So that's a super brief crash course in DIY upholstery!