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Good evening to all and we are ready to continue with finishing up the seat of the chair.  If you have been following along, yesterday we got the foam and fabric put on.  Now it is time to tackle the corners.  This is probably the most difficult part as it can be tricky.  One thing to remember is that take your time.  "Patience is a virtue" as the saying goes.  Don't rush or you will not be happy with the result.

As you will see, it is difficult to show you but we will do our best to explain the steps to you. To begin, you are going to cut a notch right in the corner where the fabric will go straight down by the leg. 

After doing this, you will then pull the fabric down and tuck under the cotton batting.  Then take the fabric and fold under as you see in this picture.

Next take the fabric and fold under the long edge making sure it is flat and you have no bulges in it. 

Tack it in place and it will look like this.  This picture shows you one of the back legs completed.

This picture shows you the front of the legs completed.

This can be a little frustrating so be sure you are patient when working on this.  Work with the fabric until you get the corner you are wanting to achieve.  If you have too much fabric on the sides, do not be afraid, at this point, to trim some of it off.  Do a little at a time and be sure as it can be difficult to put it back on. 

Here is what you want to achieve. 

Once you have it the way you want it to look, take your piece and turn it upside down.  This is where you will now hammer those tacks in all the way.

If you have excess fabric underneath, be sure to trim some of it away as we did.  You are almost finished with the seat.  Finishing the underneath part of the chair will be the last thing we do. 

Next will be the top part of the chair and we will continue with that tomorrow. 

Good evening and sorry we did not get back to our project until now.  We have finally got the foam and are ready for the next steps to get the seat of the chair finished.

We chose to go with the 2" foam as this was the best for our chair.  You many need less or more.  It depends on how much depth you need.  We measured the foam and cut it to size.

To give our chair a nice complete look we also put a cotton batting over the entire piece of foam.  The batting will stick to the foam to also give it a clean look.

Next, we cut out the fabric following the old pattern that was originally on the chair plus added fabric as we did not know what the original stuffing of the chair actually had in it.  The old straw like material had lost of lot of its fluff so we wanted to have a nice cushion.  Depending on what you have, this is where you will need to make a choice.  We did not need to put the old back in but we felt it gave something to the age of the chair.  At the same time, we knew that we needed to add more as well.  Therefore, we cut out our pattern larger to give us that extra depth that we added.  Remember that it is always easier to cut away than to add on.

After this step, we positioned the piece of fabric on the chair.  We started to tack it in place.  Just a few tacks on each side to begin so we could see what it would start to look like.  When you do this, DO NOT hammer your tacks all the way in.  This allows you to position your fabric but at the same time, if you need to do some adjustment you can easily pull out the tacks. 

After we got a couple sides temporarily tacked, we felt we still needed to add more stuffing.  Normally we like to wrap the batting around the foam, however, in this case, it added to much to the height and, therefore, did not give the chair a nice look.  Instead, we cut large strips of batting and folded it and then added it to each side.  Be sure if you choose to do this, that you use large pieces to wrap around the corners so you have a complete and full rounded edge.  The batting sticks to the foam and you will tuck the cotton batting under to give it a complete finished look. 

As you can see, it has given it a nice rounded edge and doesn't look choppy or like you forgot to put the stuffing in.  Now continue with tacking the fabric all around. 

We will be back tomorrow to finish the corners.

Good evening to all and here we are again to continue with our project.  We have now repaired the strings and replaced the burlap, and so we are ready for our next step.  This would be putting the cushion part back on the chair.  This particular chair had a straw like material as the cushion.   We put this back on the chair, however, if you notice it still tends to dip in the middle.  This means that we are going to have to put something else with this to give it some support.  Guess we will be making a trip to In-Weave to get some upholstery foam and batting.  So we will not be able to finish this step tonight until we do that. 

This is where you run into this type of problem.  It can be difficult to know how it will turn out until you get to this point.  Since the strings were broken, we thought that maybe we could get buy with just fixing the strings and using the old straw like batting yet.  However, we feel that it still needs more cushion to make it comfortable.

Sorry for the delay.  We will be back tomorrow to finish up this step. 

Good evening and we are ready to continue on with our project.  Now that we have taken everything apart, painted our chair and repaired the springs, it is time to move on to the next step.  This would be replacing the burlap in our case.  The burlap that was on there was in bad shape.  Since burlap is inexpensive, we are replacing it so that our project has a fresh look again.  

You are going to take the old piece that you removed and cut a piece by adding extra around.  Be sure to check out the old piece to see how they had it originally.  This will help you as a guide.

As you can see, our burlap piece had extra and was folded upwards.  We believe this was done to give a nice finish underneath so that it did not look sloppy.  We are going to do the same even though we will be putting a nice piece later on to complete it. 

You are going to start by centering your piece of burlap on the chair and begin on one side.  Fold it and start by putting your tacks in.   We did the front and then the back leaving the corners for last.  Then do each of the sides.  When doing your corners, you will just square them off.  It is easier than you think.  Play around with it a little until you get it the way you want it.  Place each tack approximately every 2 inches or so. We had metal bars on this chair so we had to work around them.  Each piece of furniture will be different. 

Here we have our piece finished and ready for the next step.

We will continue tomorrow on the next part.  Have a great evening.

Good evening and we are back.  If you are following along, by now you should have taken out all the staples or tacks so you have a clean look to your project.  Do not leave the old staples or tacks in as it will interfere when you are ready to put your new upholstery on. 

We are at this point now where we had to decide if we were going to refinish, paint, or leave our project as is.  We decided to give it a coat of paint.

This is how it now looks after we gave it a nice coat of new paint.  Looks like a new piece of furniture, don't you think?

So now we are ready to tackle the springs.  In this particular project, we are going to keep the original springs as they are still in good shape.  However, the string that binds them together for support needs to be repaired.

Here you can see the string has too much give.

Also as you can see in our next picture, the string is broken so there is no support.

Now it is time to tackle and restring the springs so the support is good.  If you are unsure, check each one out.  If there is a lot of give, then you need to tighten it.  If the string is still good, just loosen one end and pull it taught and then tack it back down.  We used the same tacks that was originally there as they were good yet.  For those that were broken, just follow how it was done prior.  In this case, not all were broken so you just follow how it was done and secure each end.  We did do all the springs to give it support.  This step is very important if you do not want it to fall apart later.  This needs to be strong.  The rest is going to be, as they say, cosmetic. 

Here you can see what we have done.

We did not remove any of the old, but we did redo each one of them.  The only thing we did not do was the center as it was still strong.  You will need to judge on what condition yours is in if you have something like this that you are working on.  You may have something different, just make sure that it is secure.  Maybe you have a board, for example, and it is cracked or you feel it is not as strong as it should be.  Go ahead and replace it if that is the case.  This is important if it is the seat as that is the part of chair that is most important.  You are going to be sitting on it and it needs to have good support.

Tomorrow we will continue on to the next step.  Have a great evening.

Good evening to all.  We are going to start our project today.  This project is going to be done on a day to day basis rather than showing you all in one blog.  We are going to be doing an upholstery job on an old chair.  The first thing is to have yourself a piece of furniture if you wish to follow along.  Otherwise you can always come back to our blog and do the follow along process then. 

We found this chair on an estate sale.  As you can see, the cushion is shot and the upholstery is not too good either.  We felt this would be a great example to start with.  To start, you will need a flat head screwdriver, a hammer and a wire cutter/pincher tool to help remove the tacks.

The first thing to do now is to start taking off the old upholstery.  You will remove the bottom which is usually a lighter weight fabric.  Then begin by removing the tacks carefully.  We started to do this and to our surprise, found another upholstery underneath the green.

We have now removed both upholstery pieces and have found the old fashioned springs with a straw like batting for the seat.

After you have finished with the seat, you would then tackle the back of the chair.

As you can see, this requires a lot of patience and time.  In this case, it took approximately 2 to 3 hours to remove all the tacks out of this chair.  Doing so will give you a much nicer piece to work with when it comes to doing the reupholstering and a much better finished piece.

We have decided to spray paint our chair just so it has a fresh new look.  Hopefully the weather will cooperate and we can get this step done in time for when we need to put the seat back on. 

Good luck and we will be back.

Good evening and we are back again.  This will be the last day of blogging on upholstery as tomorrow we will begin our project.  If you are wanting to try your hand at doing some upholstery, go for it.  You will find that it is not that difficult to do.  Our suggestion is to start with something small so you can get the feel of what it entails.  You can start with a small footstool, a kitchen chair or dining room chair.  This will give you the feel of doing an upholstery job before you tackle something larger. 

As for upholstery, there are many different patterns and fabrics to choose from.  As for fabrics, there is chenille, ultra leather, micro suede, jacquard, vinyl and more.  Look at where you are going to be putting your piece and you can then choose what will compliment the rest of your furniture. 

Get your piece ready and tomorrow we will begin an upholstery project.  You don't need to do anything until we begin.  You will have plenty of time to follow along.  We will not be posting this project all in one day as we normally do.  Get yourself ready for some fun.  Have a great evening.

Good morning.   Since we missed our yesterday's blog, we will do one this morning and one later this afternoon.  For now, we are talking about upholstery and some of the steps involved in starting a project.  When doing an upholstery job, you do not need to rush through it.  Take your time and you will find that it is more enjoyable.  You will also feel like you have accomplished something wonderful and you end up with a new piece of furniture that you can be proud of.  That is what is most important. 

Hope you all had a great weekend.  We will be starting our project in a few days but until then, we will be sharing more about upholstery.  Don't be afraid to try your hand at doing some upholstering.  If we can do it, so can you.  

After you have your piece that you want to upholster and you have decided if you want to keep it the way it is or update it, and you have your fabric picked out, the next step is to start taking off the old upholstery.  When doing this, be careful not too rip it too much as this will be the piece you will want to use at your pattern.  You can certainly do this before picking out your upholstery as well.  Sometimes this is a good way to go.  That way if your upholstery has a pattern with a definite design, you will know, at that point, that you may need a little more fabric. 

We would suggest using an upholstery fabric that is easy to work with if this is your first time.  Some upholsteries have rubber backs or even vinyl can be stiff to work with.  Leaning towards a chenille, micro suede, ultra leather, or a jacquard, these are quite soft and will be easy to work with.  After you have experienced doing some upholstery, then you can certainly go towards those fabrics that are heavier. 

We will be back tomorrow.  Have a great evening.