The eternal project is DONE.
(No, I don’t mean the kitchen. That’s only been like two years.)
This project has waited its turn for, uh, wow. Over ten years. Cripes.
No, to make clear: this isn’t really my personal style, not anymore. But years ago — let’s just say it was awhile and leave it at that, okay? — I was in my supposed-to-be-last-year of college, had moved in with someone, and we had no sofa after my flatmate moved out. We went shopping at the antique places, since we figured there we could find something we could afford. $200 later (and don’t ask me how we got a hundred-pound empire sofa home on the roof of a chevy cavalier because it was, well, NOT EASY), we had a sofa. No idea of provenance or whatever it is — and not really caring — but it was pretty, it matched our combined tastes, and it was hardly the standard box-crate ugly-heavy hand-me-down sofa all our peers had in their living rooms, so we were quite satisfied.
Two moves later, we moved it into the bookstore, which needed a place for people to sit (at my mom’s insistence, and she did turn out to be very wise in that respect)… except the one thing we didn’t consider. When people sit down on a sofa, they don’t really sit. A lot of people do a move more like collapsing onto a sofa.
That’s all well and good, but when the only thing holding on the sofa back is two bolts through each arm to the back… well, you can see where that’s going. First the back broke off. We tried to bolt it into place, then set the sofa against the wall as a back-stop… And despite asking people to sit on the sofa, please, not throw themselves onto the sofa, sure enough, along comes yet another moron who just falls backwards as part of sitting, and halfway into a slouch, the force of his body slams the back off the sofa, and in the process breaks the rear-arm support off its base.
Oh, great. We did what we could (very little), and plus the upholstery fabric was literally disentigrating under the throw I’d used as an informal slipcover over the seat. But by that point, we’d closed the shop, and I’d figured out how to remove the back so at least it wasn’t hanging by a single bolt anymore. (That was also when I pulled back the upholstery on the back and discovered the original upholstery, a very delicate silk-linen weave of soft pink and a bright green, with white warp.)
For the next three years, it sat in our living room after we moved north — this was actually move #6 for the sofa — and that’s sans back. It was a sort of roman-reclining-sofa… thing. Until the broken arm finally snapped off one two many times and I ripped off the upholstery to get a look at how it worked, was immediately intimidated by the notion of repair, and I bundled all parts as best I could. Except the frame. Damn hard to bundle a damn frame that weighs like fifty pounds for just the frame, and is over eight feet long to boot. So it sat in the living room, then the guest room, and generally got ignored as a “one day I’ll have money to get it done By Someone With A Clue” kinda project.
Then it got moved from up north back to the mid-atlantic, where it sat in a barn with the rest of my stuff for about six months. Then it got moved to where I lived in the mountains, and then from there to my new townhouse about six months after that. Then it got moved — and amazingly, I still had all the parts for it! — when I moved in with CP, and then again when we moved three years ago.
Normally I make every effort to be minimalist, but there are some areas where it just ain’t gonna happen. I can’t ditch any workshop items without a massive, massive amount of effort and second-guessing. And I couldn’t ditch this sofa, either. Not because it had sentimental value in the sense of it having been a wedding gift, nor because I necessarily really like the style anymore.
Naw. I couldn’t ditch it because the concept of fixing it was now personal.
After all, how many times had CP said, “you ever going to do anything with that sofa?” And I’d say, I have the template I made from the broken arm, I have the replacement part somewhat cut, but upholstering it properly would cost over a grand and maybe someday…”
Until last week, when I realized, I’d been waiting all this time to have the money to pay someone to fix it, upholster it, and produce it as finished — and in that time, I’ve gained the skills to be able to do it myself. La, getting the new arm-support prepped and in place took maybe a half-hour. Gluing, fixing, clamping and leaving, maybe another four hours and that includes drying time. Add in another hour or so to put in turnbuckles inside each arm-hollow (to spread the back-to-front stress more evenly), and then about six hours to put down the foam, staple the overpadding, and then layout and tack the top fabric. I should add, that’s with the additional two hours of taking apart and redoing the arm until I got the hang of how the folds should go to adjust for the additional overstuffing I’d decided to do.
And then finally, about an hour to get the base in place, and the back in place and bolted down, barely even an hour to put some edging along the front of the arms — though maybe I’ll remove that and just do self-trim instead, since I didn’t trim along the front line like had been on the original sofa-seat. Dunno. Doesn’t matter. Point is, I started on, uh, last Thursday, I think it was. And tonight, I FINISHED IT.
Years of no roundtuit, and now it’s upholstered and looking so purty, and now I feel like I’ve earned the right to scream: HOW THE HELL DO I GET THIS BORDELLO PARLOR SOFA OUT OF MY HOUSE.
Heh.
Tagged: construction, style, upholstery