I love to re-do antiques. It's interesting to open up an antique and see how it was made 50 to 100 years ago. The materials that they used, the techniques that they applied. It's also fun to see what kinds of things have fallen through the cushions and end up inside the chair or couch.
Probably the best find I even made was I found another chair inside. I was re-upholstering a rocking chair for a client. I re-upholstered it in the style that it was when she gave it to me. After re-doing the chair I advised her that the original chair had an attached pillow and showed her a piece of the original material. She was stunned. She said that she had always wondered what happened to her grandmother's rocker that she remembered when she was a young girl. She didn't know that it had been re-upholstered (this time as a solid back), and asked me to re-do the back as it had been originally made. I re-did the back and she was excited to have her grandmother's chair back.
If you have an antique. Pick up the seat cushion. Feel that weight of the cushion? If this is a real antique and it hasn't been re-upholstered in many years, if at all, a lot of that weight is dust. The cover over the bottom of a piece of furniture is called a "dust cover". That's for a reason. The inside of your antique has a layer of dust that started collecting from the day it was made. Don't worry, all furniture does, and it isn't an area that you can get to for cleaning.
When I re-upholster antiques, as with all of the furniture I do, I strip the piece down to it's bare frame. I don't cover over the old fabric, cutting off the welting and adding a little padding to the piece (some uphoslterers do this to same time and materials). This is referred to "re-covering" a piece of furniture. I strip it down to it's springs and frame. When a piece is really old, they were sometimes put together using dowel and glue. Not nails. Well after 50 years or so, the glue disintegrated and sometimes the only time holding the furniture together is the fabric. Once I have the piece stripped down, I re-glue and re-build any joints that need to be re-done. I re-tie and re-secure the springs if needed to re-enforce them. I have also re-made portions of a piece when the wood has dried out and disintegrated also.
There's something else that I do with all of my furniture pieces that I know no other Upholster does. I clear it's negative energy. That's right, I clear it's past energy. I, and my wife who is the Feng Shui practitioner, believe that everything has energy and everything leaves an energy imprint. When you buy an antique, you are buying it along with it's past. Good or bad. It has energy imprinted in it from all of it's previous owners. And who knows what it's been through. You've heard the saying, "If these walls could talk"? Well they may not be able to speak, but the energy is still there. So I clear it away and prepare it for it's new life with you. At the Gwinnett County Chamber, which I am a member of, when I give my 20 second information and say, "bring me your old and tired antiques and I will breath new life into them" most think that it's an advertising gimmick. Little do they understand.
