Sweat is Fat Crying

Oh my gosh, this is totally how I felt as I worked yesterday at removing the nasty, torn up fabric from my garbage-scored French country armchair yesterday afternoon.

As you may recall from this post, I found a glorious--albeit beat up--chair about a month ago while out running errands. Well, I just finally rolled around yesterday to beginning the process of re-doing it. First step? Removing all of the ragged fabric.

The Before

Unfortunately, the task is proving to be much more time-consuming than I set out expecting, thus the title of this new post. I expected to spend about three to four hours removing all of the fabric, staples, and underlinings of the chair. Fat chance at that dream. Four and a half hours after I started, I had barely removed the seat cushion cover. Not only was my fat crying, but I was near-crying by the end of the afternoon of working on this thing.

Four hours later

Now, I will admit that this is my first attempt at uncovering and recovering a chair of this kind. I knew not to expect it to be as quick of a job as the chair re-do from earlier in the summer. However, neither did I expect this project to tempt me to return the chair to whence it came: El garbagio.

Telling from the copious amount of stapling done to secure the chair's previous covering to its frame, I do believe that the last designer to his/her hands on this chair was determined that it not be recovered again. Take a look for your self:

Is every one of those really necessary??

If you look closely, you will see that the staples are inserted into a recess in the chair's frame. This meant that it was extra hard for my pincers to get a good enough grip on each staple in order to pull it out from the chair and release the fabric. In other words, not only were there one million staples in the chair, the staples were also near-impossible to get out. After trying for about an hour to get out all of the staples in the first section of the chair I was tackling, I threw up my hands and decided that I just am not going to be able to get every staple out if I want to finish this chair before my Social Security checks start rolling in.

My solution to the problem of this threatened-eternity? I pulled out my box-cutter and start slicing away at the fabric and fuzz, cutting as close as possible to the chair's frame, after which I used the pincers to remove what staples were necessary to rip out the rest of the fabric/fluff.

However, the box-cutter soon proved not up for the challenge as it wasn't able to cut through the white fluff as readily as this impatient chicitabanana needed (wanted) it to. Introduce my friend, Mr. Scissors.

He was able to expedite the process in a most pleasing way. Since patience is not my forte (yet..I am working on it), I was grateful for this as was my sanity. Here is a look of the floor around me, the cup catching the staples and the carpet catching all of the fuzzes. And this was not even halfway through!



By the time I finished the seat of the chair, there were gashes all along the aforementioned crevice which held the staples. I am a bit disappointed that I couldn't have avoided at least half of these.

However, I would like to think that I did my best to get the staples out in spite of the chair's seeming insistence to keep all the staples to itself. In the end, I just have to chalk it up to "the price of business." I suppose that I will get some wood putty to mend the gashes before I get to priming and painting the wood.

Speaking of painting and priming, I have decided that I am going to paint the base of the chair white and make it as shiny as possible (in the past, white paint and shiny haven't always worked out for me). As for the cushion fabric, I am still trying to decide. I know, that is terrible isn't it? I admit that I have been kind of distracted with work and such, so it's not as if I have spent the last month and a half agonizing over the decision...though perhaps I am guilty of avoiding the decision :-/ Either way, from the way that the current stripping is going, it looks like I still have plenty of time until I absolutely must make a decision. Perhaps during the hours ahead that I have in removing the rest of the fabric I can pledge my mind to think only about what fabric to replace the old with, and not allow myself to think of anything else until I make a decision! If you have an opinion, look at the choices I am working with and cast your vote!