Curb Lurking
In college, dumpster diving was all the rage. After the end of the year move out, sightings of students scooping treasures out of the trash were a common occurrence. Over the years, I’ve adopted a slightly more sophisticated alternative: curb lurking. You never know when someone is going to decide a perfectly lovely piece of furniture is no longer of any use to them. As someone who is constantly hunting for cheap-if-not-free furniture to redo, I even purchased a truck (her name is Inara) to facilitate my habit. There is only so much one can stuff into a Corolla. So when the Bear and I went to look at Christmas lights in late 2016, we took the truck because the best lights are in the swankier areas of town and people in said swankier areas of town occasionally put really great furniture on the curb when they redo their houses. Merry Christmas to me: we found an arm chair in fantastic condition and gleefully popped it in the bed of the truck.
I hadn’t gotten up the courage to do a full upholstery job, but I really wanted to try, so I had been hunting for a project chair on Craigslist for months without much luck. You don’t get much luckier or lower risk than finding one for free.
I have a confession: I am not “joy in the journey, enjoy the process girl.” I’m “before and after, get it done girl.” The projects I enjoy most are the ones that require almost no attention to detail and allow me to check out mentally so I can listen to a podcast. This project absorbed all my focus as I took the chair apart one staple at a time, taking pictures all the while to help myself remember how to put it back together because that’s what all the tutorials said to do.
Do any of those pictures help you understand how this chair was put together? No, me neither. Especially after so much time has passed. Honestly, it absorbed all of my brain space to take this thing apart and put it back together again, so I didn’t take pictures of the process. If I get a chance to do another one, you’ll get all of the nitty gritty details, I promise. (This is a great tutorial, though.) After a week of staple pulling, fabric cutting and re-stapling I had this.
Eventually, I found a great throw blanket, pillow, and ottoman to style this piece of pretty, but we’ll get to that later. My take away from this project: upholstery is nothing to be intimidated by if you go slowly and approach it with an exploratory mindset rather than a perfectionistic one. And, if you’re a beginner, use a solid fabric – it’s so much more forgiving since you don’t need to be paranoid about patterns matching up. Happy stapling!