Monday, June 3, 2013

How to Reupholster a Chair part 3

And here she is naked as a jay bird and ready for some new fabric....
and here is where I tried my old hand stapler, and two other staplers from Lowe's 
all unsuccessfully 
when I finally decided to bite the bullet and buy the beauty below...
 Ordered it from Amazon Saturday night and first thing this morning it was on my porch.  
I LOVE getting tools
It's amazing how much difference having the right tool for the job can make....
This is pneumatic so if you don't have a humongus air compressor sitting in your garage (like my husband does) you'd have to purchase a small one of those too.
I was running it at about 55 psi today...
 It's really easy to use.
Nice,small and fairly lightweight without being "cheap" feeling.
But no safety so that scares me a little bit mostly because of the two curious monkeys that are always with me.... 
 The only down side is ordering staples and not being able to buy them off the shelf.  But you get a box of 10,000 so that should last awhile....
 Here's the new fabric laid out with the old pieces as a pattern.
It's very important to remember that you need to add at least a good 3" or so all the way around.  The old pieces you pulled off have been trimmed down after they were attached to the chair.  
You have to be able to pull on it and stretch it really tight as you staple it on.
I was also trying to make sure that I matched the center of a square (in the fabric pattern) with the center of chair itself.  And match the back with the seat.  
(see Part 5 for photos explaining this)
Then each of the arm rests needed to match each other too.
This is something to keep in mind when ordering or purchasing your fabric.  If your pattern is stripes for example, you might need more fabric in order to make all parts of the chair have stripes running the same way.  

7 comments:

  1. I love the fabric! that would look great on my chairs in the office. Where did you get it?

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    1. Joy bought it at Fabric Shack in Waynesville. She said she bought it awhile back but they tend to carry stuff for awhile. I didn't even think about that it would go really well!

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  2. I am so glad I saw your post on upholstering the chair. I just got finished with redoing my sister's chair and I sure could have used that staple gun. I can't wait to show my husband. You can never have enough tools I tell him, and with the right tool the job is faster and easier. Alaina

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    1. Oh I could not agree more! Once I got really comfortable with it I was stapling really quickly and the actual recovering part went twice as fast as usual. It was worth it. On Amazon I think it was $89 and shipping was a few bucks. The staples aren't that expensive either. I would highly recommend the stapler!

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