Week of Projects Day 5- Wing Back Chair

This project took by far the longest to complete. Not because it was the most time consuming, it just took me forever to finish it! When I say forever do you really want to know how long? Well way back in June... of last year... I mentioned in this post that I bought some ugly stuff from Goodwill. Well this chair was one of the things that I bought. I don't think I would have gotten it if I had known I would take a year and a half to finish it!

Way back in June I naively walked through Goodwill and saw to matching (yes you heard me say two, and you will only being seeing one today because I haven't touched the other) wing back chairs. I fell in love with what I thought they could one day look like. For a whole $10 I snatched them up and brought them home. Then I started looking up how to reupholster them. That was when the fear set in. Yikes! What did I get myself in to? Needless to day I was super intimidated. They sat in my garage for months. Dallin finally got the bright idea of moving the ugly things in to our front room so I would look at them all the time and be forced to work on them. In a way it worked. After another week or two I finally decided that while putting the fabric on would be hard, taking it off wouldn't be. That was how I convinced myself to start.

One by one we pulled out every staple and took pictures all along the way so I would know how to put it back together. About 500 staples and a few more weeks later it was just wood and padding. It felt so good to be done with the first stage. Every single thing I did with that chair I had to convince myself I could do it. I thought every part of it would be impossible, but somehow I would tell myself this one piece won't be so bad to put on. Then when I would finish that I would wait a few more weeks to gear myself up for the next intimidating piece. I can't believe how long it took! And the worst part is that every time I got a step further I realized that it really wasn't that bad.

Anyway enough of that, here is the chair before in all it's ugliness glory.

What you can't see is that a cat got to it and scratched up the sides completely. It was pretty bad. And to prove that I really started this project a long time ago here is Benton helping me take the staples out.

Sorry if you came to my house and the chair looked something like this. It was that way for a long time...

And here is what it looks like today.

Another project done! My front room looks a little better with a complete chair. Now all I have to do is the other one... Any bets on how long you think that one will take?