We're not dumb and we have a staple gun

Many of you (3) readers are familiar with the Chair. The Chair has been my (Stephanie's) bane since Jim and I met in 2001, when the chair was covered with a Star Wars sheet to hide its decline (Jim's word) (Stephanie prefers ugly).

The Chair has had a long and storied history, starting when Jim's dad was at Cornell, through Jim and Jim's sister's childhood, closing the circle when it came back to Cornell with Jim (this is the part where Stephanie usually gets excited, because closing the circle typically implies an end).

Jim moved the Chair into his apartment in Bellefonte, where he would sit in it and sounds like a tortured chipmunk would echo contentedly throughout the apartment where he lived (sqeeeeak, sqeeaak). Given the state of the chair at that time, it might actually have been a tortured chipmunk living in the cushion. Who knows?

Then, the Chair moved into our Longmeadow lane duplex, and then to Mountain Road. Moving the Chair was always a bit of a conundrum, what with Stephanie trying desperately to "forget" it, and Jim refusing to get off of it ("It's so comfortable!")

The Chair lived in our basement at Mountain Road for two years, where it became home to innumerable basement-dwelling critters. It became a source of contention "I'm so tired of moving it when we can't even use it!" "But it's SOO COMFORTABLE!"

Despite this contention, the chair did move with us to Virginia, where it lived in a storage unit along with everything else we owned for several months. Finally, it moved into our house. However, due to the fact that it now qualified as a wildlife refuge, it was banished to the patio, and then after we managed to build a shed (with about 10,000 screws), it lived in the shed. With the other animals that lived in the shed (black widows, snakes, along with the innumerable rodents that served as their prey).

Now, as we hopefully move closer to a (more) permanent home, we've started going through our belongings again (sigh) and seeing what does and does not belong. The Chair was once again on the chopping block.

Now. I was not totally opposed to the chair. Apparently, it's very comfortable. I had suggested a compromise literally years ago: Jim gets the Chair reupholstered and it can live in the house with all the other chairs. "Oh, I will! Definitely! Tomorrow!" was the response that I got. I think that Jim was afraid that any kind of intervention would ruin the Comfortableness of the Chair. And since it's my house too, and I already share it with three other species that I like (dog, cat, rabbit) and many that I don't (stinkbugs, snakes, mice, rats, squirrels... I could go on) I wasn't super excited about bringing the wildlife refuge into the house.

This past week, though, the decision came to a head. We pulled the Chair out of the shed, and had a good look at it and all of the stuffing that had been pulled out. The mice think that the Chair is Comfortable, too.

Rather than send it down the way, we decided to give it one last chance. Heading to Joann's, we purchased foam, cloth, pillow stuffing and staples.

The next day came the demolition.

.......

Oh, the Chair. How ugly and broken.
This picture does NOT do it credit. It's uglier than that.

This ugly:

See? the hole? that's the mouse's front door.

What you can't see is the mouse poop, nesting material, and other random debris (or the smell...).

So the stripping process began...







This took approximately 7 hours (for both of us working together), and involved the removal of approximately 500 tetanus tacks and 13,000 rusted staples (all installed courtesy of Bernie Jones, the imaginary chair assembly worker who was a little staple-happy) (that part isn't imaginary. There were SO MANY staples).
See those little tiny black dots in the wood in the picture above? Those are all totally unnecessary rusted staples that had to be pulled out piece by piece (because God forbid they should come out as one piece).

And these have been affectionately (ha) dubbed "tetanus tacks". We both suffered bleeding stab wounds from these (Jim's was more of a gouge, while Stephanie's was more of a puncture wound). (It's important to be specific about these things).

We did find some good things in the Chair. These included: childhood toys (including barbie accessories and crayons), a Gary Morgan chevy keychain (out of business for more than 10 years), $1.76 and a fabric swatch from the original chair covering (the ugly's been hiding for a while).

Finally, after dark, with sore muscles and visions of staples dancing behind closed eyes, came the naked Chair:



....


Day 2:

We woke up the following morning with mixed senses of optimism. All things considered, it hadn't been so hard to take everything off the Chair. Surely it couldn't be that bad? We had spent some time looking up instructions for various beginning upholstery projects. All the websites claimed it was best to start with a drop-seat chair, or perhaps a bar stool. But we're not dumb and we have a staple gun. How hard can it be?


It was approximately 130 degrees out, so we moved the Chair indoors.

We started from the bottom inside up/out. First step: the front base.


This was the single easiest thing we did all day.

Next came the arms:




Those were hard. We opted against including the wood workings because they were broken and otherwise in bad condition. That meant that rather than just cutting and arranging the fabric the way that the old fabric had been arranged, we had to invent something. Behold our fancy twisted fabric arms. I actually rather like it.

Then came the bottom. As we've mentioned, apparently it's a comfortable Chair. To retain its comfortableness, we added pillow stuffing and covered the stuffing with muslin.

This muslin, by the way, is left over from the picnic tables at our rehearsal dinner from our wedding (something old, something new, something borrowed, something... blue.... wait a second...).

Next came the back cushion. While I like to sew, and I have my mother's sewing machine, I don't actually know what I'm doing. Which made sewing a square pillowcase (you know, with the 3-D thing?) rather more difficult than it probably needed to be. The following picture is so bad it's funny.

But it worked!!

Next: the clamps. Because we weren't adding the wooden add-ons anymore, we had to attach wooden pieces to the top to maintain the structure/shape of the piece.


Then, we decided to add the back fabric and then buttons. The buttons actually hold the pillow to the back fabric. The original design of the chair had the back fabric and the pillow as one piece, but that involved fancy-shmancy sewing stuff, so we opted for the harpoon-needle-through-the-pillow approach. I shoved the needle as far as it would go, and Jim would be waiting on the other side with pliers to pull it the rest of the way through the cushion. It worked pretty well, with only a minimum of swearing, bleeding, gnashing of teeth and "discussion".

Pretty buttons.

The next step was the back panel. Which needed to be stapled to a cardboard ring on the top of the chair and then carefully folded down over the back of the chair. Which went pretty well, especially when Jim channeled Bernie Jones and stapled about 600 staples to the chair. Unfortunately, the fabric was in the wrong spot.

... huh, no picture...

To curtail further "discussion", Jim went for takeout Chinese. I listened to some music and sewed the bottom pillow.

I didn't measure it before I sewed it. And I didn't measure the new pillow to make sure it fit in the chair. I don't know how it worked.

But it did.

It fit like a glove.



Jim came back, we ate dinner, we (Jim) unstapled the back panel, restapled it, and voila!!!


And WOW.

That Chair is COMFORTABLE.