Re-Upholstering Victory

Not too long after Christian and I got engaged, I looked at his hideous, uncomfortable armchair and said to it, "I'll be dealing with you." I didn't want to have such an ugly and impractical chair in my house. It was obvious that someone had tried to reupholster this chair years ago, and maybe it looked not-as-bad then, but their work had started to come undone on the sides. It was bad.

I knew Alice had made a slipcover for her couch when she and Cletus lived in married student housing at UNC, so I asked her for help. And last Wednesday, she and baby Katie came over, armed with a sewing machine. We got a lot done that day -- I think we would have gotten more done had I not needed to go to Wal-Mart to get a staple gun, and then needed to go back to Wal-Mart because I got the wrong kind of staples, and then needed to go back to Jo-Ann's because I didn't get enough fabric the first time.

But I finally finished yesterday. I declared victory over the chair! I think it looks much better than before, and reupholstering was definitely less expensive than buying a new chair. As Alice and I were taking the old fabric off, we saw that the people who had reupholstered this chair before had signed their names and written the date on the wood inside: May 12, 1986. Which means that the fabric we were pulling off the chair was almost older than I was. (We also saw scraps of the original fabric. It looked like an old couch that our family had when we were little.) Thankfully, all of that fabric is gone.

It's still an incredibly uncomfortable chair, but at least it's no longer hideous.

The front:


The side:


The back:


Me, enjoying the chair: