Our Family Upholstery Business

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Upholstering is a trade that anyone can learn by trial and error, but I'll try to give you some idea of how the work is done.

The first step in re-covering a piece-a chair, for instance—is to take off the old fabric, beginning with the part that was applied last. This is usually the dustcover under the bottom. If there is none, start with the ruffle or the back and remove it with your tack lifter.

You'll normally find that the back section was put on at the top with a tack strip and then turned down and tacked or stapled under the bottom of the frame . . . and that's just what you'll do later when you replace it. Some chairs also have a metal tack strip down each side of the back, but this is expensive and we prefer to blindstitch the edges by hand.

After the back, the outsides of the arms come off . . . then the insides of the arms, the front of the backrest and the seat. If you think you won't be able to remember where all the pieces go, label the parts as you remove them. Note the order of removal, too, and reverse it when you put on the new material.

As a chair is stripped of its cover, we take the cotton padding off the seat and back, retie the springs and fit new burlap over them. This is the foundation of our upholstery job, and a sudden collapse of the underpinnings a few weeks later would be very bad for business. If the wooden parts of a piece of furniture need refinishing, we do so before we put on new material.

As a rule, a chair or couch or whatever is reassembled the same way it came apart, with new covering cut to the old pattern . . . but if we come up against something we can't figure out, we call a shop in the next town and ask what to do. Our aim is to restore the article to its original condition. It gives us great satisfaction when a customer tells us that a piece of furniture looks just the way it did when he bought it new.

One of our greatest accomplishments was the restoration an 18th-century early Victorian couch. The antique had escape. a fire with bad burns to the cover and wood. The damage was so bad that the first thing we did was tear off the old fabric and throw it away.

When we tackled the woodwork, we found that all our scraping and sanding couldn't take off the black discoloration We tried mopping with a hot, strong lye solution (one cup lye to one gallon of water), followed by a rinse with clean water and a vinegar wash to stop the caustic from eating the wood. Traces of blackness still lingered even after that treatment, and we escalated to swabbing with full-strength bleach. Five bleach treatments later, the surface finally looked the way we wanted it to.

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