kitchen couch - the saga begins

oh man. so, i finally started to take my couch apart. it is a beautiful, gorgeous, sweeping and stunning piece - and it is going to be SO. MUCH. WORK!





after taking a moment to gaze upon it and admire its beauty (faded, but more poignant because i didn't have to do anything to make it one whole piece), i get into it and i start taking it apart, diving in with the tools my awesome coworker ron scrounged up for me. when he handed them over, i was very blase, thinking i wouldn't need them. after all, it was before staples, right? i would just pull them out by hand. what could possible have been used to tack it down that was so very bad?



UM THANKS RON

those are wicked, possibly rusted but definitely very old, nails or pins of some scary metal variety. the types of metal-borne diseases i could have contracted doing that by hand (and the shots i would need to make sure i didn't die from that) are legion.

so i kept digging down and down and down. note to self: next time, start unhooking the fabric from the bottom. otherwise you will have an ungodly mess as the fabric starts to collapse on you since the top pieces are already unsecured:



not the way.

i finally got it stripped down all the way in the back:



or at least, as far as i thought i was going to go. but then i got around to the front and made an unpleasant discovery:





ladies and gentlemen, we have horsehair.



i thought i could just leave the basic parts of the couch intact, but the fact is that i've opened that shit up, now. i KNOW what's inside - and it's disgusting. i won't be able to sit on it happily unless i know that what i'm sitting on is not incubating hundred year old parasites, and the only way to be sure of that is to buy it new and do it myself. so i stripped out all the padding, and i'm going to have to take out all the burlap, all the muslin, all the webbing, and start again fresh: new foam, new padding, new couch, essentially.



chicago's "only the beginning" is playing perkily in my head. i'll be back in to work tomorrow to rip out everything else, clean it up, and hopefully start cutting patterns.

also, my friend alisa and i had a brainstorming session and i decided (for you purists) that i am not painting the wood. i am reupholstering the couch in saffron yellow velvet, which should be rich and ridiculous enough to offset the dark brown wood. after this, bright blue couch with old gold wood and, possibly, bright obnoxious buttons.