"I'm starting to see why people throw things away." By the time Mr S-P uttered those words, he had been prying loose staples for well over an hour. If he had been a professional, he theorized, he would have been charging a ton for the labor he was putting in this evening. It did seem like a lot of work to save a few hundred bucks, but surely it will prove worth the attempt, even if the money gets spent later.
Every member of our D&D group hates our dining room chairs, myself included. They used to be passably comfortable, but that was years ago. With us playing games every week, with adults (several of us on the big and/or tall side) sitting in those chairs for two to three hours at a stretch, they have compressed, and some have practically collapsed. A few have permanent dips, while others pretend to still be in their original domed shape on the seats. When we moved the weekly game downstairs, and took a handful of these chairs down to the new area, my daughter and my neighbor flatly refused to sit in them. We have cheap plastic folding chairs from Target that they prefer. These upholstered chairs were cheap too, if I'm being honest. I got a great deal from World Market back in Charleston, when a department manager had to take a return from a difficult customer, and was so angry about the whole thing, he offered me all six chairs for something like 150 bucks, just to make them go away. Naturally I jumped on that offer. It's the reason that now, six years down the line, I am not all that upset when the cats scratch them daily, or when they are showing signs of deterioration at such a young age.
When Mr S-P first took a look at one of the chairs, he flipped it up on the game table, and pulled back the lining on the underside. I was so excited that it was held in place with Velcro. This will be so easy, I thought. Oh, no. Not at all. To get to where we needed to be, he had to pry loose about a thousand staples, just on the one chair. He had to disassemble the whole thing, which meant he had to find an Allen wrench of the proper size. He sent me for a Phillips head screwdriver, and I got to take out a couple of pocket screws, so I felt like I helped. He also took a knife to scrape the thin foam padding from the sides of the seat base. Only then, once he had exposed the woven webbing that had once had a little elasticity but was now permanently stretched out, did he stop to wonder whether we had access to a staple gun to reassemble the whole thing. His is on the mountain, out of range until around June of next year. T's was lost in his garage, and although they looked for it, it was not to be found. So we ran off to Lowe's, where I talked him into an electric staple gun, so that I have a hope of being able to use it some time before I die. (My hands are just done with foolishness, and I can't squeeze the handle trigger on a standard one, not a single time. I always said I had wimpy artist hands, but it's de trop now.)
I got distracted by making a late dinner while he finished reassembling the seat base. I have no idea whether he got all of the upholstery back in place, or the chair legs and back put back on. He did warn me that if I was serious in my musing about reupholstering them (as I had said absent-mindedly while running my fingers where the cats had scratched it raw), it had better be now. He wasn't about to do this again, ever. I need to decide soon. Because if I don't do it now, we will probably end up throwing the whole kit and caboodle out to the landfill, and get a whole new set of chairs. And then I really will be part of the problem, not the solution.
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