Return of the Sofa!

We just sit across the room and admire it. Yes, this is better than television: our reupholstered sofa!

A few posts ago I told about the two chairs that we recently got back from David Wieberg, our upholstery guru. Well, today he brought us the sofa, which is kind of the pièce de résistance.

What do you think?




I don’t know about you, but I think I’m in love!

—With a sofa!

Here’s a link to my post some months ago when we said goodbye to the chairs and sofa as they were. On it you’ll see pictures like this one—the “before” picture of the sofa:




Obviously, the excitement’s been mounting around here, once we found out the sofa was ready to be delivered. We moved our now-second-string sofa out onto the sunporch (where this one used to reside) to make space in the living room. For the past day, this is what we’ve been staring at:




Since they’re predicting some pretty serious snow this week, and since the only way to get large furniture onto the second floor of our house is to remove a wall from the sunporch and carry it up the back porch steps, this weekend was our window of opportunity for delivery.

For the record, this is what it looks like with the storm windows and wall removed from the back porch. (And yes, this is the way that Great Aunt Polly’s grand old upright piano was moved in and out of the house—before my time: via the back porch steps. Yeah—there used to be a piano in this living room!)




Suddenly, moving a sofa up here doesn’t seem so daunting, eh?

Here are some more views of our luscious sofa.








. . . And here is Sue saying “Wow!” when she got home this afternoon and saw the sofa for the first time!




Now, we’re sitting in the chairs across the room, facing the sofa, and occasionally saying things like, “Wow, it’s like something you’d see in the lobby of a classy old movie theater, isn’t it!” and asking each other questions like, “So, is the correct word for a sofa like this boofty, or boopfy?”




My dad was here when the sofa was delivered, and his comment was, “It looks like furniture that would be fit for the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II!” Ha ha ha.

Sue and I had an awfully hard time deciding on sofa fabric last fall—we wanted something that looked like the 1930s, but we needed it to be sturdy enough to be “usable.” And we wanted it to feel comfortable. Maroon-burgundy seemed to be a popular color for the period. We found this fabric in St. Louis at Artistic Fabrics—it’s from Waverly.




Of course, it’s hard to guess from a little swatch what a color and pattern will look like when spread over the surface of something as big as a sofa. But this afternoon, we were congratulating ourselves totally on our selection.

And yes, already it seems to be a cat magnet. Tomorrow, I’m going out to find us a throw-thing to put over it!




Well, that’s about all I wanted to tell you tonight—I just wanted to share the joy du jour!

Our Chairs Are Back!

Elation! Elation!

Remember when I told you about how we'd found someone to reupholster some old furniture that came with the house? Here's a link to that post. You'll want to see it so you can view pictures of the chairs "before" reupholstering.

Well, we finally got them back! Today! This very afternoon!

And they look fantastic!

Here--!




They probably date back to the 1930s, apparently. The gold one is my personal favorite, and it has been for ages. It was the one I'd always choose when we came to visit Grandma.





The pink chair, I'm pretty sure, had belonged to Great Aunt Minnie (pictured in that earlier blog post I referenced above). My dad says he saw a chair (or chairs?) apparently identical to this at Mrs. Delong's house, out on ritzy Moreau Drive. (Mrs. Delong lives in a castle!) Dad was visiting her recently and noticed her chairs then. Mrs. Delong and Aunt Minnie were friends; maybe they bought the chairs at the same place--?




David, the fellow who did this lovely work for us, commented on how much "fun" it was to get the pattern on the back of the pink chair to be symmetrical: "I had to just walk away from it once or twice; it was more difficult than I'd thought it would be." I think he did a fine job, don't you?

I wasn't expecting it, but he also managed to create a sequential pattern on the back of the gold chair, too. Wow!

Check it out.





I include this picture of the foot of the gold chair, because I had included a "before" photo of it on that earlier post. David has a friend who does the refinishing for him. I think this was a good job, too. The legs of both the chairs look fantastic!



Ahhhh, here they are again. If I didn't have to be sitting up here in my office, I'd be down in the living room reading a Jane Austen novel to Sue, and we'd both be sitting in these chairs!




So: they're refinished, tightened and reglued, springs retied, webbings, twinings, burlap, and bindings and whatever all reattached or replaced, plus the new cotton cushioning and the foam pad, and, of course, the new fabric. He did more stuff, too, inside there, but I'm not smart enough to be able to describe it to you.

Oh, yeah, and when I asked him if he could make arm covers, he said "sure" and used the plastic wrap he'd used to transport them in to make a rough pattern for arm covers for both the chairs. He'll bring them to us, with the leftover fabric, when he brings us the finished sofa.

I asked David if he wanted me to get his name "out there"--I wasn't sure he was wanting more business, since he's got another job and only does reupholstery on the side--but he said yes. So here's his name: David Wieberg, in Centertown, Missouri. His upholstery business is called Greenridge Upholstery. I'm not gonna post his number because I'm afraid that telephone spammers and solicitors might latch on to him. But if you can't find him in the book, let me know and I'll give you his number.

Yes, uh-huh, I'm smiling tonight.

Trepidation; Elation

I feel like I’ve fallen behind in posting, but then I do realize that the only expectations here are my own. It’s my blog; I can do what I want with it. Somehow, though, I feel like it’s gotten away from me. My posts are feeling like articles or research papers, instead of, say, the real thoughts in my head.

For about three decades, now, I’ve kept a journal, so writing about my day, my thoughts, my “here is where I am right now,” is indeed the only form of writing I feel truly qualified to attempt; thus so much of my blog here is a tangent, a lark.

I honestly don’t know nuthin’ about cooking—I’ve never even taken a basic home ec class. I don’t know nuthin’ about science—I defer all definitive statements to the specialists. I’m not an authority on Missouri: I grew up here; I left; I came back. But I always feel woefully lacking in an understanding of its history and landscapes. As for Jefferson City, I am a total fraud: I come from across the river, from the rival town and ultra-rival school. I only decided to start learning about this place when I moved here a decade ago. I’m a Columbian, by birth and by culture—that means I’ll never really be accepted here.

But I do know how to tell you what’s going on right now. I’m sitting on our recently repaired sunporch, and the late-afternoon sun is slicing in. Patches, the original Opulent Opossum, is lying in the middle of the soft new carpet, on her back, her hind legs in the air, snoozing as only she can do.

It’s one of those early cool days in September, when the pleasant north breeze is still a surprise, because you’re still expecting the Missouri summertime steam bath. It will take several more days like this before our bodies begin to accept that autumn is really here.

Well, it seems that way to me.

---------------------------------------------

Here’s the big news today: We said goodbye to two elderly, beat-up chairs and a sofa. But it’s only temporary—when we see them again, around the end of October (I understand), they will be transformed into elegant, fine furniture fit for high society: We’re getting them reupholstered (and repaired, and refinished).

Here’s the history: The sofa is the one Grandma S always had in her living room . . . well, until Aunt Minnie got sick and moved in with Grandma, and her (nicer) sofa was placed into the living room. Grandma’s older sofa, more beat up, was demoted to the sunporch, where it’s been since Aunt Minnie got sick—when was that? The late seventies?

Here’s a picture of Aunt Min sitting on Grandma’s sofa; back in the good ol’ days. Christmas ’75, I think.




Hmmm. I’ve always liked the old sofa—good memories, good vibes.




And one of the chairs—a “wingback” chair with nice soft arms—had long been my favorite place to sit when visiting Grandma. The fabric was a satiny damask, soft and cool, and I don’t know . . . just comfortable. When it was time to sit down and talk, I’d make a beeline for that chair.

Please understand that I’m not insane with nostalgia; when Grandma died and auctioneers were brought in to tote away everything that could possibly be valuable enough to sell—and my parents and uncles and aunts encouraged us to keep the stuff we wanted—I held back.




It’s a difficult social calculation: Would I appear greedy if I prevented something valuable from being sold and adding to the estate, just because I “want” it? If I let something be sold that really should be kept in the family for the next generation, then am I being blind, or callous? Would I appear greedy if I held on to such a thing, for that reason?

We kept things that seemed heirloom-ish, like the china cabinet, like the table. We kept some furniture and other objects just because we knew we would use them.

Understand: when they sell stuff at estate auctions, most of it goes for very cheap, sadly cheap; I couldn’t feel very guilty for keeping things that might sell for twenty dollars, for which I would have to spend a hundred to replace.




Anyway, there was another category of Grandma’s old possessions: Ones that the auctioneer rolled his eyes at and explained were worthless. The sofa and two old chairs we’re having reupholstered fit into this category. “They’re not even worth carting away.”




They were in sad shape. Poor old sofa; it will have to be disassembled and put back together. The chairs, pretty much, too. Our upholsterer helped me to feel better about it: Never were these pieces of furniture abused—they were simply worn out. Fabric ages; springs push through their bindings. It happens after, oh, several decades of use.

Yes, it will cost us some money. We’ve already purchased the fabric, which of course is no cheap thing right there. And the fabric for the sofa came from a store in St. Louis—so you can add the cost of travel to the expenses.




But I think we’ve been showered with luck, if my instincts and this fellow’s estimate are correct. We had gotten an estimate for the chairs a few years ago, and the prices from that fellow were completely beyond what we could pay. We were heartbroken; the sofa, of course, would have been impossible, if the chairs were already far too high.

We threw a big canvas sheet over the sofa, to hide its thousand imperfections. And the chairs sat in the basement. We considered putting the chairs out by the side of the road, so they could dematerialize, one way that many household items find “new homes” here in Jeff.

But I couldn’t bear to do it. You might as well have asked me to leave a box of kittens by a busy highway.

Then, earlier this year, a chance conversation with an acquaintance introduced this new fellow, who is supposed to do fabulous work and have surprisingly low rates.

I finally got around to calling him; he came over, prepared an estimate for us, told us how much fabric to buy, told us he wouldn’t be able to start until early September. And meanwhile, it has taken us this time to select and procure the fabrics—which brought us to today.

Of course, it is more complicated that that—we had to disassemble one wall of our screened porch in order to get the sofa out of the house and down the back porch steps. And you know that kind of thing is easier said than done.

But we did it, and we got it all put back (need to touch up some paint now—one thing leads to another). And so here I sit, looking at this room without the sofa. So strange.

I’m slightly fearful—what if this upholsterer is horrible? What if we’re appalled, and then still have to pay for the work? We’ll be kicking ourselves: Should have checked references! Should have asked to see some of his work!

. . . But sometimes you just trust. My friend said he does good work; and the price was indeed very doable for us. For the cost of buying a fine new sofa and two fine new chairs, we are resuscitating some of my favorite furniture in the world, with fabrics that do them justice, fabrics I’m in love with.

Yes, there’s some trepidation—but there’s also anticipation. I think we’re going to be very pleased in another month and a half.