Here are two easy chairs that went from a drab beige/taupe to pink.

Before:

Stripped frame.

After:
The owner also wanted fewer buttons.

This is a pretty nice, and well made loveseat, and the old fabric was in need of replacement. The owner is a local artist, and she chose this bold red fabric for the piece that features an assortment of birds, leaves, and flowers.

Before:

Note the large lump in the stuffing of the arm.

After:

These two pieces were owned by the same couple with the two previous chairs. See: http://lefebvreupholstery.blogspot.ca/2013/09/two-oak-chairs-blue-beige-geometric.html. The fabrics for the two oak chairs was chosen to coordinate with these two sofas.

Before:

The current fabric was actually very good quality, and still in good shape, but it was outdated, and it was time for something new.

Note that the cushion was too long on the front, as well as a bit too wide side-to-side on the front “horns”.

The sofa is also a hide-a-bed.

Previous upholstery that was not removed by the last upholsterer.

The cotton batting on the arms was a later addition…

This is the side of the large sofa. When we were taking them apart, we found that all the old foam on the interior was finished, so it was all taken down to bare wood, and new foam was cut and fitted to both frames.

Previous upholstery roughly cut (instead of removing it) found on the front rail of the sofa.

Sofa frame totally stripped.

New foam padding (the grey portions are reinforced corner joints). Additional teryline was added over this (see next photo showing sofa arm). New deck fabric installed.

Finished pieces!

The bottom feet are finished on both sides.

It’s fairly rare that we have an exact date for old chairs, but this particular chair came with a few stamps and a card, which gave us this information.

The chair is a well made wing chair built in 1962. We’re not quite sure what company made it, but it was made for “Morgans” as the card states (see photo).

The chair had been stored in a damp basement, and had also been ruined by cats, and the owner had the upholstery removed from it, thus the reason our before photos only show the bare frame. The original upholstery was a bright lilac purple with hints of light blue. Only threads of this were found on some of the remaining tacks (which we removed).

The grey padding is rubberized horse (or pig) hair.

Curved side rails.

As the card states, the chair was made on April 3rd 1962, and two additional office date stamps on the sides stated May 1962 (presumably when the chair had upholstery applied over the frame).

A few “in progress” photos, including re-padding with foam and cotton.

Preliminary (rough cotton) covers.

Arms and wings attached.

And finally the finished chair. Again, this one was in white, and belongs to the same customer who also owns the white love seat, and the other white (Coombe) wing chair (see past posts), as well as several other chairs we’ve posted.

These chairs came into the shop about a month ago needing some attention. The chairs are stunning oak with a beautifully executed quarter-sawn grain-painted pattern on the back pieces, and with several other pieces in regular quarter-sawn lumber. The original seats are leather, with straw and cotton stuffing, but the internal webbing (straps) have failed, and the seats have therefore punched through.

The original tacks were made of leather, wrapped around a metal nail head. Sadly, removing them was exceedingly difficult, and even through many could be removed, most were rendered useless in the process. Note the wide variations in thickness to the tacks.

The set contained 6 chairs (5 regular chairs and one arm chair). The arm chair was in particularly dreary condition, with some damage to the finish (note greyish white haze).

Only the arm chair carried an original label, and this same label was carefully removed and reattached to the chair with a plastic protector once the chair was finished.

You can read a long and interesting article about the John C. Mundell Company here: http://www.wellingtonadvertiser.com/index.cfm?page=colDetail&itmno=548

The chair seats were given a complete overhaul, which included new webbing, new burlap, re-installing the original stuffing (to keep the chairs historic), a new layer of thin padding, a cotton cover, and then the new imitation leather. The client would have liked real leather, but the costs of real leather are quite high, and a suitable distressed style leather imitation (vinyl) was used. The seats were trimmed in a matching edging, and with hammered tacks.

In addition, all the chairs were cleaned, and polished with lemon oil.

These two very different, yet similar chairs both belong to the same client, and were upholstered in the same fabric. Both chairs needed extensive and time consuming repairs.

Chair No. 1 is a beautiful arm chair with a 5-spring stuffed seat. The old webbing straps had pretty much deteriorated, and the chair frame was also loose.

The chair is beautiful quarter-sawn oak.

Note the condition of the seat bottom. It should lay nearly flat, with very little curvature. This is not the case, since the straps are broken, and the springs are now pushing against the thin bottom fabric.

Chair No. 2 is also quarter sawn oak, and it is more of a dining room chair. It has been stripped and refinished at some point, and it has had several poor repairs. The arms are also missing the lower blocks that would finish the end “rolls”. The carved arm ends would have continued over these in a more rounded shape, but both pieces are gone.

The previous upholsterer did not trim their fabric, or bother to install a bottom fabric.

During the disassembly, we discovered that chair No. 2 originally had a leather seat.

In a fun twist, we also discovered that chair No. 1 also had a leather seat. Here is chair 1 with the upholstery removed.

Leather scraps found on chair 1.

Chair 1 has also had some previous repairs. This side rail was recycled from another old chair, and it doesn’t match the other rails (which are all square). The owner asked us to repair the chairs, but to keep them as-is, since the repairs were part of the chairs’ “unique charm”.

Chair 1 was mostly disassembled, but not completely, since many of the joints were still very secure.

Chair 2 needed a new seat board, since the existing board was starting to delaminate, and has some damage on the edges which would have been difficult to fix.

Chair 2 was extremely difficult to disassemble and repair because someone attempted a repair by nailing all the pegged joints together. This made it insanely difficult to take the joints apart without destroying all the components of the chair. It took hours.

New webbing and newly tied springs on chair 1.

The finished chairs:

I love the texturing done on the feet.

The back rail had been nicked and gouged from the previous upholsterer, so we touched-up all the marks with stain and specialty touch-up markers.

This was a fairly simple repair to a beautiful and very old chair. These chairs are sometimes called a “Hitchcock” chair, or a “Baltimore” chair, as well as by a few other names. The chair was very likely made around 1820-1830.

The chair was in great condition except for a break on the left scrolled arm.

Chair with the broken arm removed:

Here is the broken arm, which was cleaned-up (at the joint), and drilled for a dowel (for extra strength).

We made a quick clamping jig to align the pieces while the glue dried overnight.

And here’s the finished chair.

Can you spot the repair?

Super close-up.

A few additional photos of the chair’s stencils and decorations. The main chair colour is grain-painted to look like Rosewood, with other decorations in gold paint.

The original hand-woven rush seat (in great original condition).

The underside:

These were very interesting chairs to work on. At first glance, they didn’t seem very old, but when I was dismantling them, we made several interesting discoveries…

First, here were the chairs “as received”. They were both upholstered in an old textured fabric in two different colours.

The sagging was due to both seats having essentially “caved in” (see farther down).

We were not surprised to find that the previous upholsterer had just covered over the old fabric…

Both on the seat, and on the back.

A repair on both chairs had been attempted on the underside. One had this old 100LB bag of sugar…

A quick search reveals that this bag is actually a Redpath sugar bag, with most of the red ink faded.

The other had this old table cloth with decorative pom-pom details.

Both collapsed seats looked like this from the bottom. The burlap and ties on both sides had torn away, and the stuffing on both edges of the seats was being pushed into the bottom of the chairs. Note that these were stuffed with straw and cotton.

The client wanted the chair frames to be painted a dark brown/black colour. These were the stripped frames ready for spraying.

The seat portions were redone with foam, rather than the old straw and lumpy cotton, and the backs were entirely rebuilt from scratch (NOT covered over the old ones). These were re-stuffed with the existing cotton rolls. New buttons were made in the same fabric (the old ones were mismatched clothing buttons).

These were finished about a week ago, but we’ve been working on them for nearly a month.

These two chairs were in extremely bad shape. I don’t know if the owner has had them several years, or if these are chairs she picked up somewhere, but they arrived at the shop looking like this:

She wanted the chairs stripped and refinished, and reupholstered with a new (modern) fabric.

I have no idea what happened with the bottom fabric, the back rests (and stuffing for them), and the gimp/piping. It looks like they were mostly stripped down but they had another fabric on top of what’s currently showing.

The original stuffing had already been replaced with a mess of foam, cotton, and webbing.

The chairs had several broken pieces, and hundreds of holes (from staples and tacks) that were in places where they shouldn’t have ever been placed (like along the centre of the mahogany stretcher in the following photo).

The two lower triangular blocks aren’t original, and there is another repair along the top.

As I mentioned, these took a long time to fix. Pierre had to reglue them, putty and patch them, and replace missing original wood blocks for the seat portion of one chair.

This is how they turned out. New webbing, burlap, new foam/stuffing, new top fabric and double-piping, and black bottom fabric. The client was very happy with them.

Here is a rather nice Victorian style fan-back chair. It’s not terribly old (not a real Victorian), but it’s a nice, comfortable chair with a nice Cherry frame.

As you can see from the photos, the chair has seen better days. The upholstery was stained, dirty, and in need of replacing. In addition, the owner also requested that we upholster over the two upper wood “wings”, since he found that there was too much wood showing.

One of the wings needed a repair.

We also added a few transition pieces to make a better transition between the wing and the rest of the back, since there was a “step” in the wood there. We upholstered over the wood portions without damaging them, just in case a future owner should want to have them showing again.

This chair matches the owner’s other blue striped chair (same fabric) seen here: