our life as a chair

Putting a longtime dream above sanity and any consciousness of intercity traffic patterns, Eilene and I took a wild gamble and enrolled in the only intensive sixteen-week furniture upholstery class in North Texas. Held in an airplane hangar near a not-even-close-to-local community college two counties over, the class became so demanding on time it meant throwing all else on the back burner one night a week and making a two hour drive in 5:00pm traffic.

We were two hours late to the first class. And although we could choose any variety of projects separately, we focused on starting a single project together. Our donor piece was a ratty, threadbare $20 deceased-old-lady Craigslist project chair we’d stored in our family room for a few years in hopes of just such an opportunity.

We set out to deconstruct the existing upholstery in sections and label each piece, the goal being simply to recreate the old pattern identically with newer, more modern fabric.

After marveling at the unbelievable number of tacks and staples that needed to come out in order to clean up this chair, we were then squarely confronted with the long and winding history this piece of furniture brought with it. The gaudy blue fabric we saw on the outside covered two prior upholstery jobs, the original being a disgusting dark gold 1970s fabric, followed by an odd light-colored almost-carpet substance. On the inside of the frame, in very faint pencil, were the words “To Caroline”.

We were indeed a bit taken by the inscription and obvious intention and emotion that went into the work. But on further deconstruction, our romantic wonderings were replaced with the realization that Caroline’s thoughtful upholsterer did one of the most fantastically horrible reconstruction jobs we could have asked for. We were forced to ditch the old pattern, and a few weeks into the semester it was apparent we needed to create an entirely new pattern completely from scratch. Having thus far worked together on the same piece successfully and not yet murdered each other, Eilene and I added our own little inscription.

We also made rightfully sure, once we got the ball rolling, we stayed super-serious and stuck to the task at hand.

The next ten weeks saw a lot of cutting, re-cutting, stapling, re-stapling, and even a few acknowledgements when about to leave home at 6:30pm that we’d never make it in time to make progress (and either staying home or playing hooky to go hit the movies).

Beginning the class brought with it a host of fears and insecurities related to the possibility of trying and failing. Some weeks saw us procrastinating or stuck in stagnation, sometimes almost paralyzed for fear of screwing up the next phase in the reconstruction of something beautiful out of the drastically imperfect bits and pieces with which we began. We were at times disgruntled and argumentative, especially when progress was poor, or a roadblock proved difficult or intimidating. It’s easier to risk failing when we just avoid trying or can blame some external circumstance like lack of time, rather than face the risk of failure after truly exerting some honest effort.

As the course progressed, so did the level of setbacks we experienced in this first time working side by side on a creative endeavor. The more we attempted to make progress toward the overall goal, the more it seemed we were plagued by mismatched expectations of each other, communication breakdowns, unfair needs for mind-reading, and issues of leading versus following, amongst a host of other problems. There were moments when our hope was renewed with small bursts of progress and connectedness, but mostly we were landsliding toward the question of whether or not we’d ever be able to even work together on anything, or whether all our efforts were just going to fall apart at the seams.

Things tend to be darkest before the dawn. Our complications reached a crescendo just near the end of the course, and it became painfully obvious our issues and stumbling blocks in the project were less about the project and more about the issues and stumbling blocks we had with ourselves and each other.

Sometimes things need to be deconstructed in order to be put back together in a way that looks beautiful. Occasionally, the original pattern can’t even be used, everything needs to be reconstructed from scratch. But in reworking what’s salvageable and discarding what’s broken, the end result can eclipse even the brightest and most generous expectations.

I wish we could say that after sixteen weeks, we knew all there is to know about upholstering furniture. Hell, I wish we could even say that after sixteen weeks, we finished our chair. But neither is true. What we learned from our own project and watching the projects around us in class was that pieces of furniture are individual, as are the processes by which they are reconstructed. Only continued practice and dedication will bring different and specific challenges to light, and bring exposure to the ability to work through them.

When we made the drive out to the hangar for our last date with the chair, we arrived having moved past all our prior working difficulties. We were not only completely comfortable with each other, we were comfortable with ourselves and our own walk through the process of giving something a good try without having to reach perfection. In the end, giving it a shot was all that really mattered. We had a great last class, and enjoyed our stopping point of being halfway through the chair’s upholstery job.

As for the chair and its fate, we also realized at some point during the course that everything that anyone ever wanted to know about upholstery or anything else for that matter, it’s all available in some random instructional video somewhere on Youtube. But that’s another post, for another time.