Thursday, May 9, 2013

Reupholstery: Dissection

Yay! It's time to rip into this chair finally! The first layer off will be around the back of the chair along with the piping underneath that layer.

These are my tools - that screw driver really sucks and I'm probably gonna need to find a better one...


Stupid screwdriver broke immediately, but my friend gave me a better one, 'old yeller.'

I'm having a hard time understanding all the sunflower seeds....

I already gave myself Tetris with a rusty staple.

Gross: mold and old grode. This will be an easy piece to pattern.

I'm beginning to understand the sunflower seeds. That white stuffing underneath the layer of cardboard here is actually the remains of an ancient mouse nest.

I have no idea when these mice lived here but it was over 5 years ago because I have been moving with this chair for about 5 years and it has always been spewing these sunflower seed shells. Also I've never had a mouse problem....

Really gross.

They had a roomy place.

 

I removed the legs of the chair, the cardboard and the mouse nest. It's looking like I should have gotten more burlap - I couldn't tell that the vinyl was backed with burlap when the chair was put together.

All along I've been taking notes on the construction as I'm taking this thing apart. You can see there are 4 ties at the seat of the chair that have been sewn to the bottom seam of the seat and then stapled to the wood. The ties are blue and yellow in the picture above.

After removing the rest of the pink vinyl, there was some padding around the rim of the circular edge of the chair that was stapled to the wood underneath. This came off pretty easily and revealed some pretty rusty chrome. This chair may have spent portion of its life out in the weather, probably after someone realized that mice were having a party in there.

The last piece was the burlap seat support. Wow, that's disgusting.

Also all of this fabric smells really bad since I ripped into it. It was never a smelly piece of furniture when I lived with it. The smell was released after I took the nest itself out and the sun hit it.

That water mark is presumably mouse pee.

My last step of the day was sanding the rust off of the metal. I have some bronze rustolium that I'm going to paint over the metal with which will keep it from rusting any further and make the chair legs look awesome.

Unfortunately I can't pattern this disgusting fabric right away so I have to fold everything up and store it in my home again until I have the time. This is really disgusting, I know, but I'm quite invested in this project as you can see.

I am re-thinking my fabric choice after seeing the water damage on the materials. I think I might use a similar vinyl instead of the groovy polyester I have. It would be really sad to have a spill on the new threads after working so hard redoing the upholstery.

Also I may simplify the pattern of the seat of the chair if I find that it will still be strong enough to support a human.

I need to buy more burlap and also some padding for the rim job :)

Til next time...