Potential Public DIY Failure - Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in passing and shared a photo that I'd gotten my hands on chair ripe for re-do.  I'm slowly but surely making some progress on it (while simultanously convincing myself that I've set myself up for failure...a public failure, now).

Here's what I started with.  A beauty, huh?  I mean, the lines are there, right?

I removed the slipcover job. 

My goal from here was to carefully remove the upholstery job, save it, and use it as a pattern for my new fabric.  Um, yeah, that didn't happen for a few reasons.  First, the fabric was so utterly disgusting.  This thing has been sitting in the basement of what is essentially a post-college frat house for the last  4 years or so.  Gross, gross, gross.  And second, I couldn't actually get the whole chair apart because parts of the frame (which are around other fabric-covered pieces of the chair) are glued together.  This means that saving it wouldn't even entirely work as a one-for-one on the pattern front.  So I've decided to revisit how this thing's going to get reupholstered altogether.

I took zero pictures of the destruction of the chair (minus a few close-ups), but it was full of dry-rotted foam, stuffing, crumbling cardboard panels, and what I can only assume were millions of staples.  This is what I've ended up with.

I have ideas about how to get this thing back together...ideas that keep me up at night (type A much?)...ideas that led me to buy like $100 of specialty upholstery supplies (will this be worth it?).  While I wait for these supplies , I've roughed out a pattern with some muslin.

I sort of refuse to fail at this project even though I admittedly have nowhere to put this chair in our home (a small detail that Michael won't let me forget).  I may try to recruit some DC friend to babysit this guy (or my other recovered chair) until we move back to TN in the next 5 years (which is the timeframe I've been saying for the last 7 years). Anyway, my aversion to failure on this one is mostly driven by the fact that I bought fabric for this project months ago.  Can you guess which one???

find me elsewhere