Friday, March 30, 2012

Before & After

Here I go again, showing off my latest project. Before you know it this is going to become my reupholstery blog. Sorry be such a show off, but when you finish a project this big and no one is home to see your handy work besides a 9 months old (that's right, I said 9 month old, crazy), its kind of anticlimactic. This chair has the best before and after - I love how dramatic the change is.
Before
AFTER!!!
I am really proud of this one. It turned out a lot better than my couch. I attribute that to 1. a little more experience under my belt. 2. my new staple gun. Seriously makes a HUGE difference how the fabric looks on the chair. It looks tighter (because it is), cleaner, and professional. Can I say that, or am I patting myself on the back a little too much here? Anyway, that staple gun was the best $140 I ever spent. It also sped up the whole process by hours and hours. With my couch, it probably took me two weeks to staple on all the fabric because I literally had to hammer each one in after I put all my body weight on my manual staple gun and the staple still only went half way in. My couch had over 2,000 staples, so, you do the math. Now it is a breeze, all my staples go in flush and exactly where I want them with barely any physical effort. I'm in heaven.
And I am really tempted to keep this chair - it is crazy comfortable and it happens to match my living room perfectly - but alas, I must sell it.....for millions!

Sunday, March 25, 2012

Spring Break, Baby!

These are the days that I love having a teacher for a husband, the BREAKS. Spring break, fall break, christmas break, summer breaks. Lots of breaks - its awesome. It would be even more awesome if Steve still had all those breaks and we were living off more than a teacher's salary, to, you know, actually vacation.
So, this spring break, we pretended to ignore the teacher salary thing and go on a not free vacation (meaning not just going to Heber to visit the folks and call it good). Although we did go to Heber, we also went to the beautiful town of Greer, AZ and spent the night in a cute little cabin, went on a few nature hikes, cozied up next to the cute little fire in our room, and ate some expensively good food. I call that a real vacation. Plus Steve got to go fishing THREE different times - so needless to say (but I will) he was a happy guy, even though he literally didn't catch a single fish.
Behold, our travelog pictures......

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

VIctory is Sweet

If you all could see me now (all three of you who read this) you would be witnessing my victory dance in all its glory. Steve thinks I am annoying - but I just can't help myself! I sold my couch today, hooray! I had it on craigslist for a week and still hadn't had anyone come and look at my couch (I had plenty of scammers though) and I was getting sad and moping around. Today was my lucky day though. A nice young LDS couple with a little 1 year old boy and a little girl on the way are now housing my couch. I hope they love and care for it as much as I did :) I was able to sell if for $550 - needless to say I made a pretty good profit. Enough to buy a nice staple gun, which is all this cowgirl really cares about. I am already working on another chair I got for pennies at Goodwill last Saturday at "half off" day ( I may have had to elbow a few people to get to it first, but I came out victorious in the end). I am really excited about this chair, the fabric I am using is awesome. If you can't tell that I am totally obsessed with all things upholstery right now, I am. So, with great effort I shall talk about something other than the fact that I sold a couch today - I know its really not that interesting to anyone but me. Nevermind. I can't. I can't talk about anything else, so I'll just stop - talking that is.

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Done and Done

















Holy cow. I feel amazing. I finished it, a few hours ago, and it turned out great, in my opinion. The "it" I am referring to is "this" couch. Remember?
Time for the big reveal. "That" couch is now..."this" couch!
Viola!
Pretty great right?
So I learned a couple this (actually LOTS of things) during the process of reupholstering this couch over the last month.
1. I LOVE reupholstering. I thought I might hate it because the task was so long and daunting; but really I enjoyed it, a lot.
2. I don't just love reupholstering, I love creating and making ugly things pretty. It is crazy fulfilling.
3. Sewing box cushions is really hard, can I just say that? Yes, I can. Hands down, hardest part of the whole shebang. Just saying.
4. I'm addicted. I want to do this again. Soon, real soon. SO....I have dreamt up a game plan. I kept thinking in my little brain how cool it would be to make money doing this, seeing that I had so much fun and all. Game plan: sell this couch on craigslist. Take profit from said couch and invest in PROPER tools for reupholstering (no more manual staple gun - seriously need a pneumatic one). And here is the best part, SHOP for gently used furniture. That means, yardsales, thrift stores, craigslist. Anyone who knows me, knows how much I love my yard sales and thrift stores. As a job? How incredible would that be? So the key word up top there was "dreamt". We'll see if anything comes of this - but I'm going to give it a go!
(I currently have my ad up on craigslist, and let me tell you, I feel lame. If feels weird trying to sell people on your product, I feel downright cheesy.)