When I bought this house I knew that everything that went inside the house was going to have to be cheap. I've always lived with roommates. All my roommates have had most of the major items that go in a house. I basically had everything for my bedroom and a dining room table-and that's it. Except for a few old coffee tables, practically nothing for the living room. And the kitchen was pitiful. I had a few baking pans, 2 forks, 2 spoons and a knife. p-i-t-i-ful.
Garage sales and estate sales are my favorite places to find things. I don't know why, but I feel more accomplished when I find some great treasure than if I had spent a lot of money at a fancy store. Sure, you have to be careful about what you buy, but 95% of the time I'm happy with my purchase.
I think it has something to do with my Walton blood. I've talked about him before, but my Grandpa, Rex Walton, is the king of garage sales.
He also loves overalls.
He even takes it a step further and goes to the storage unit auctions. He knew Storage Wars was cool before TV did. He finally found a unit with some diamond rings the last time! In the same storage unit was a ton of furniture. I was thinking "Perfect! I need furniture!" Then I saw it. Terrible. Worse than you could imagine. (Think mid-90's floral/abstract paint splatters) So those were a no-go. He sold them at his annual garage sale. Apparently it was exactly what someone was looking for.
My mom set aside this chair for me to look at.
I loved the shape of it and it was pretty comfortable, but not really very pretty. You can tell that at one point it was very fancy, but she was really starting to show her age. I figured that if I started with a free chair, I could at least try to reupholster it and if it turned out horribly, no harm done.
So, I bought one more package of canvas drop cloth from Home Depot (I already bought 4 for my curtains-more on that later) and then I waited. And waited. This chair was intimidating me. Seriously, giving me the stink eye. Luckily, I had a week of vacation coming up so I could use that as my excuse to procrastinate. "I'll just wait until I have plenty of time!"
Then it was vacation time and I had to get started. All the instructions I found online pretty much said just get after it and figure it out as you go. So that's what I did. I just started pulling staples. For about 4 hours. It was ridiculous. I forgot to take a picture of the basket I was keeping them in, but I would guess there was about 300. Yikes.
I tried to take pictures as I pulled pieces off so maybe I could put the new fabric together the same way. I would definitely recommend this method. Once I got all the fabric off, I pinned these to my drop cloth and cut out the new pieces.
Thursday was a super big help, like always.
We did a little playing.
And sitting.
Then I dragged the thing to my parents garage so I could use his staple gun attached to his air compressor. I'm so thankful he had this. I would still be stapling the dumb chair if I had to use a manual staple gun. I bought a button-making kit at Joann's (my second home for the past couple months) and made some buttons to pull through for the tufting.
I think it turned out great! I love it because it's so neutral, no matter what I change everything else to, I just change my pillow cover to match-just like this beautiful blue fabric!
I'm pretty proud of it.
Speaking of proud, I feel a little like a proud parent because my house was in the Denton Record Chronicle today. The paper is doing a series about different neighborhoods in Denton and focused on my street today. If you want to read the article there's a link here. The article online doesn't have my picture, but in the real paper on page 13A this little beauty is front and center! Well, really it's right above the obituaries, but that's close enough, right?
That's right. I'm practically famous.
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