Project Furniture Refurb!

So last night began Phase 1 of Project Furniture Refurb!

Let me first tell you the backstory of this little chair that I'm going to reupholster.  

When I was a teen, my mom liked to go to estate auctions and she got some totally sweet stuff for our house from those auctions, including my bad ass dresser which you can see the corner of in this picture:

I know, I'm sorry.  These are the pictures you get when
I choose to blog on my lunch break.  One day I'll be
a well-prepared blogger.

It is awesome and curvy and beautiful and it even has a secret drawer in it.  When mom brought it home and was cleaning it out we found a bunch of cool stuff in it.  Like a copy of the guy's will wherein he left his daughter only $5.  The previous owner of my dresser was awesome enough to not only have a dresser with a hidden drawer but he also was awesome enough to want to stick-it to his daughter with one of the best F-You's I've ever seen.

*ahem* 

Anyway.  

At that same auction, she bought my chair.  This, beautiful, beautiful beast:

Yes, I want the purple storage
ottoman and fainting couch too.

She hated it.  Mom always intended to recover the chair.  But in my 13-year old excitement, this was the coolest. fucking. chair. ever.

I told her I wanted it in my bedroom.  I thought its teal and olive swirl, shiny fabric was the most badass and romantic thing I'd ever seen.  So into my bedroom is went and there it stayed.  

Through countless moves to apartments and back to Mom and Dad's house the chair went with me wherever I went.  Until eventually, the last time I moved out, the chair was in too poor of a condition for me to let others use it.  So I left it in the basement of Mom and Dad's house for safe-keeping and for imagination to strike.

Last night, as soon as I got off work I trekked out to Mom and Dad's and talked to Mom about my plans to reupholster the chair.  Being my mother, and understanding her daughter's sometimes ill-conceived ideas, she tried to ground me in my pre-reupholstering excitement haze by relating to me stories of her own attempts at reupholstering in the past and how they had fared.

She knows that I like to ride on waves of excitement without thinking things through so she was being the realist that she is.  Being the heedless and headstrong person I am, I continued, undaunted.  I understand this will be a battle.  But I, like great generals before me, will march into this battle and fight tooth-and-nail until I have the most beautiful chair ever seen!  

So I gathered up my tools, say down by my chair and said a prayer to the upholstery gods that all would go well.  I petted the chair and told it I would take care of it.  I took a deep breath and began to strip the fabric off of it.

*GASP* It's like seeing your baby with its intestines hanging out of it.

Dad came downstairs and set in to helping me.  Whether it was to help me during this painful time of wounding my baby, or just to have a nice distraction for a Wednesday evening, I'll never know.  But together we stripped her back and sides and I began to plan for the next phase of the event.  

My fabric should be in by Friday, so hopefully within a week i'll have my darling all put back together and looking beautiful.  Pray for my darling chair as we undergo this daunting reconstruction.

Hugs n kisses,

Annie Jay