An Upholstery Project

On Friday, I finally started work on an upholstery project that I've been meaning to do for a number of years. Well, I was actually nudged by OH into doing it, as he wanted to replace the chair in the kitchen, which is the subject of the project, with a chair from the living room, to make more room for him to decorate in there.

As a consequence, he set about dismantling the chair, in order that I could get started.  The problem was, I didn't get to take a photo for the before and after.  I did take some photos of the dismantled chair, to show why it needed renovating, so here are those photos:

The upholstered chair seat was obviously in need of re-covering, after 13 years of OH's bum having sat on it day in and day out in the kitchen. I was surprised really that it hadn't lasted a bit longer.  It was upholstered with John Lewis fabric 20 years ago and given to us by OH's mother when we bought our first house together. It had belonged to her mother and is a Linden Utility Chair made in the 1940's.

Interestingly, I found a piece of the original fabric whilst I was removing the later fabric from the cushion seat. Here's a photograph:

It has a kind of satin type finish, so I'm assuming it was probably used as a bedroom chair, but I might be wrong.

Anyway, I sat myself out in the garden on a stool, balanced the chair seat on the rack on the back of my bike and proceeded to pull out what seemed like hundreds of staples. Once I got the back off, the inside of the seat looked like this:

I felt like I was doing my own little Escape to the Chateau DIY renovation, which was cool. To be honest it's the first time I've spent more than a few minutes in the garden since the beginning of lockdown and as the weather was a bit cooler with a nice cool breeze, it was wonderful to feel the sun on the back of my neck.

The frame of the chair is pictured in the photograph below:

As you can see from the photograph, the varnish on the back of the chair frame has completely worn away too, so the whole frame will need to be sanded back and then re-varnished. It will probably take me a while to finish as I'm not a master upholsterer, but it's fun to have a go as it's quite a simple project.

I've kept the fabric that I took off both the top and bottom of the chair seat and I will be using these as templates to cut the new fabric from. I now just need to ask OH which fabric he would like me to use for the project, from a selection in my stash.

I'll keep you posted with progress on the project.