This piece was originally posted in January 2021. It may be one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done, and it felt fun to pull it from the archive.
2020 was a weird year, yes? It feels like the year from which I’ve shared the least, and that silence feels like both a stuck-ness from fear of saying the wrong things at the wrong time and also a silence that was necessary to make sense of everything that was happening, to be able to step back to truly listen with empathy and compassion. Sharing is a practice I’m trying to cultivate for the new year, including sharing more things that feel too wordy or imperfect for social media. I’m here less for perfection, and more for the process, and this is entirely the latter – a process that I wanted to write down for myself, first, because this is something that brought me a lot of joy during the strangest year yet.
It’s hard to figure out where, exactly, to start this story, as it began both nine months ago, but really almost six years before that. I think to start, I’ll take it back to the last time I wrote a post on this blog, which was in March, just after the pandemic hit and everything began shutting down. That was the first lifetime ago, when I still had plans to try to make collections of prints for the Cheerful Print Shop last year. Hard to say whether those plans are paused or canceled; nine or ten months later, the only thing I know for sure is that I have no idea what’s coming next…so for now, I’m making it up as I go along, as I think most of us are.
Plans for the print shop weren’t the only thing that got put on indefinite pause. I haven’t completely talked about it publicly, but while trying to sort out how to continue on with being a photographer after moving to Austin and trying to recover from, what I now realize is/was, a pretty intense burnout from weddings, I had been working part-time refinishing furniture for a locally, female-owned and run boutique shop that sold home goods and mid-century vintage case goods – dressers, nightstands, desks, hutches, coffee and side tables, that kind of thing. It was manual labor, and a little bit technical – being comfortable using some basic power tools, screwdrivers, a paint sprayer and roller, putty and wood glue, and trying not to sand through 50-year-old veneer or several layers of fresh paint were the normal daily assignments. What wasn’t on that list was anything involving upholstery or sewing – it was hard surfaces only. And the pandemic also brought that work to a screeching halt.
For the first six-ish weeks of another round of not being sure what to do next (which feels like it has been constant ever since we moved to Austin 2+ years ago), I tried to put most of my work energy into writing. And here, some things I need you to know, so that I can continue on without feeling like this story makes anyone else feel guilty for what they have or haven’t done in the past year: 1. I don’t have human children, and my pandemic life is really not that different from pre-pandemic life, aside from work-related affects (of which there have been plenty, and I’ve talked about some of them in my newsletter). I do have pets and a spouse who very actively participates in the tasks that it takes to maintain and care for and run our household and caring for a family is not something that takes up additional resources right now – which is to say, I have a lot of freedom in how I choose to spend my time; and 2. Making things, creating things, and doing projects, was (and still is) a way of coping for me – and there is no shame intended if that is not your coping method. I’m actively working to unlearn productivity as a measuring stick for my worth, and 2020 was definitely a year that forced me to confront that. Even so, writing and I have a complicated relationship (we’re working on it), and after those first few weeks of struggling for most of day to put words on a page, a break felt necessary. What made sense in that moment, was to build a bridge of sorts – to take something that felt a little bit familiar, refinishing furniture, and finally work on a project that I’d been putting off for six years. This is that project.
And this is where we need to take a small detour into the more distant past, back to October of 2014. We were living in Annapolis, and a friend who ran a vintage furniture rental business alerted me to a post on Craigslist for a pair of Eames lounge chairs that were being sold for $150 for the pair. I dragged Ben along and the guy selling them hauled them out of his overstuffed garage in pieces. I might have known enough at the time to look for the Herman Miller sticker on the bottom of the chairs that would confirm they were originals, but I can’t remember exactly if I knew for sure when I bought them if they were real or a knock-off. What I do remember is turning to my friend Google not long afterward, and discovering that not only had I found a pair of real designer vintage chairs, but one is a vintage pre-1970s model – the first version of the chair ever made – that is increasingly rare to come by.
That said – there was a reason these beauties were only $150. I have exactly one photo of what they looked like as-purchased below – teal fabric upholstery that I’m 100% certain was not original and was covered in brown stains, with missing hardware, and wood that was scratched with some small pieces of veneer missing – but at least all of the major pieces were there and mostly whole, although whole might be a loose definition of some of the pieces. What you can’t see well in that photo is the damage someone inflicted on them when they attempted to make repairs.
Part of what makes Eames lounge chairs special is the design; a true original does not have visible hardware connecting the three wood panels to one another or the armrests. All of the hardware is hidden on the interior or underside(s) of the chair, and the panels are joined together via rubber shock mounts that are adhered onto the wood panels with a special type of super-strong glue. Sadly, glue doesn’t hold forever, and many Eames chairs meet a fate of having one of their “ears” – a rounded piece on each side of the middle wood panel – break off when the glue fails and a shockmount disengages from the panel. The shockmounts on these were so far gone, some of them were broken into several pieces and all of them were being held on with a mix of glues, foams, and, most heartbreakingly, screws and bolts that had been drilled though the wood panels, putting holes all the way through the exterior of the chair. At least whoever did that repair had managed to save the wood panels from any pieces completely breaking off, but the goal of keeping all of the hardware and connectors hidden had been completely and permanently ignored.
After spending a lot of time on random message boards and in the depths of the internet trying to figure out how to fix them up, I eventually decided that restoring these chairs might be more than I could handle. At the time, we were living in an 800 square foot condo, and barely had enough space to store regular cleaning supplies, much less tools and chemicals and workshop materials, nor the space to actually do the work. The best option, it seemed, would be to send them off to a company or person who actually knew how to restore them and had the correct tools to do so. After searching to no avail to find someone in the D.C. area who might be able to help, the closest place I found was in New Jersey, and their quote was $700 per chair, just to repair the wood damage and not including any upholstery – and even at that price, still would have been a steal for two designer vintage chairs. Getting the chairs to New Jersey was in the realm of possible, although I never got as far as pricing out shipping or figuring out if I could drive them there before I put all of the pieces, disassembled, into boxes (the wood shells) and plastic bags (the cushions) and let them take up valuable space in the single storage closet in our condo…and then proceeded to move them just like that to two more houses, where they sat in various empty rooms or closets, waiting to be brought back to life.
There were times over the past six years that I’d periodically try to find another way to at least get started on them, searching for upholsterers or trying to find people I knew who sewed who would be willing to take money in exchange for at least maybe taking on the cushions…and no one really seemed to want to get involved (that probably should have been my 100th clue that this would be a PROJECT). The upholstery was the part that really felt out of my league as my experience with a sewing machine was limited to two crafts I completed in sixth grade: making a felt pillow in a life skills class and sewing myself an outfit under the watchful eye of my grandmother (who could sew anything) that summer. In researching how other people refinished Eames lounge chairs, I came across a few ways involving staples and hot glue that would have made the reupholstery much less of an undertaking, but my heart wanted them to be restored, not hacked back together.
Getting started is always the hardest part and this project was filled with a ton of dead ends before it really even began. I think after we moved the chairs to Austin, still in boxes and trash bags, Ben gave up hope of ever being able to sit in one of these chairs. But when I found myself with open space in my schedule for an unknown amount of time, and saddled with a goal that I made at the end of last year – to finish all of my current unfinished projects in our house before buying anything new – AND finally having enough knowledge, at least of how to bring wood back to life, to have a place to start…it really, truly felt like this was the time to try. So I hauled all of the pieces out of the back of the closet and ordered a sewing machine with some birthday money and finally, finally, got started.
If you are here to read the exact step-by-step process for how the chairs finally came together, I am so sorry to disappoint you – I didn’t really have a process, other than to do the next most obvious thing, which is conveniently also how I’m approaching life during quarantimes (and may be something that lives on after, we’ll see how it goes). Refinishing and restoring is a scary process to start because, more often than not, you have to make things worse before they get better. You have to deconstruct them, take something that was whole and turn it into parts, and damage pieces in the process. I wish there was a way around this part, but there just simply is not. There is no reconstruction without deconstruction, and deconstruction is a very messy process, and within that process, you often have to make the choice between being quick and careless or being slow and painstakingly careful…and either choice you make is still going to create a new problem to solve.
After taking the chairs out of the boxes and into the garage, the first obvious step was to remove the old shockmounts so that the damage done when they were previously repaired could be fixed correctly. And even though the previous repair was not done well, there wasn’t an easy way to remove the shockmounts without also removing some of the precious rosewood veneer – so precious, it is no longer legal to make new furniture from rosewood because it’s endangered – as well, which then turned into a new problem of figuring out how to repair missing pieces of veneer. Fortunately, very generous people have made videos and put them on Youtube to show you how to do such a thing using xacto knives, tape, chisels and wood glue. And thank god for Ebay, where niche supplies, like rare old types of wood veneer, are widely available. There are also two companies, Hume Modern and Modern Conscience, that sell replacement Eames chair parts, including high-quality shockmounts and the correct adhesive for attaching them (or, if all of this sounds like too much work, both companies can even do the restoration for you in exchange for $$$).
Every single step of this project took longer than I expected it to – I told Ben in April that I thought the chairs would be done by the end of May, then June…by the middle of August, the wood panels were *mostly* done – new shock mounts installed and all of the veneer issues were resolved, but the shells still needed to be cleaned and waxed – and I had yet to even start on the cushions. In a fun 2020-style twist, I had ordered vegan leather from an Etsy seller in April, only to have the order cancelled because the fabric wasn’t in stock due to shipping delays caused by the pandemic, and then a month later received a surprise package of the wrong color upholstery that had to be sent back. Finding supplies in the midst of a global pandemic (especially at the beginning, when most places were closed due to lockdowns) was it’s own type of challenge; the upholstery fabric that I ultimately landed on was ordered sight unseen from fabric.com, with lots of crossed fingers that it would turn out to be a workable, useable color and weight. I was hoping for something that had the warm color tones of unfinished, veg tan leather, but what I got was undoubtedly, full on blush pink…which I wasn’t too sad about, but Ben wasn’t in love with it (and I have a habit of telling him “oh it won’t be too pink…” and then whatever it is arrives and it is always, always, undeniably pink). It might not be exactly what I would buy if I could have gone to a store to pick it out in person, but sometimes constraints force you to make decisions that work out in the end…and I’m not at all unhappy with this one, especially because it probably turned out to be easier to work with.
But the scariest part of the whole process – even more nerve-wracking than removing the old shock mounts – was taking apart the first cushion. At least with the wood, I was about 80% confident that I could most likely fix whatever I screwed up, but with the upholstery, there were no guarantees that I would be able to put the cushions back together. The two challenges I had no idea if I’d be up to were, one, making and sewing on piping (the corded trim around each cushion) and two, reusing and reattaching the zippers. Once again, Youtube came in clutch with piping tutorials. My mom, who taught sewing classes while she was in college, wasn’t even sure how to re-sew the zippers, because apparently zippers are supposed to be sewed on while they are zipped closed so that they line up correctly when used. But these zippers could not be sewed on while closed…because one half of the zipper was attached to the rigid plastic backing that held the cushion to the chair, and I didn’t have a way to reattach that half if it was removed (because sewing through plastic was a challenge I didn’t feel comfortable taking on without an industrial sewing machine). I honestly think that not knowing what I was doing might have been helpful for this part; I was trying everything for the first time and didn’t really know how things were “supposed” to be done, so I felt free to experiment with trial and error – and if whatever I tried didn’t work out, I could rip out the stitches and try again.
This felt like the place to make myself a safe place to fail first – and if there is nothing else I take away from this project, or 2020, creating an opportunity to make mistakes on purpose was maybe one of the most valuable lessons – by making a practice cushion with scrap fabric before ever cutting into the new upholstery. I used the deconstructed original cushion as a pattern, and reused the piping and the zippers, partly to reduce waste, and partly to help keep things as similar as possible so that it would all fit back together. And creating a practice template cushion that worked gave me confidence to continue on to making the real cushions. That said, getting the piping and the zippers lined up on the fabric and with each other and then pinned on was challenging and involved a ton of adjusting, readjusting, ripping out seams and trying again. But with loads and loads of pins, the zippers did line up in the end.
It took a total of two-ish months, working for at least an hour almost every day, to cut out and sew all six cushions, plus four armrests, with piping and zippers, and then another week to make buttons from a button kit (my fingers did not appreciate my fabric choice for that part) and attach them with a giant upholstery needle. And at the beginning of November, the chairs were finally ready to be given a coat of wax and reassembled.
I’m sure that if I had known six years ago, when I found these chairs, that it would take close to seven months of active work to refinish them, I would have had second thoughts – and while the chairs sat for years in storage, I certainly did wonder if I would ever get around to making them usable again. But once they got started, this project gave me energy in a year that tried to suck it out at every other turn. It’s probably both a super-power and a fatal flaw that the problem solving of making and fixing things excites me rather than daunts me, and I want to figure out how to do everything myself.
There have been so many times over the past two years, since moving and leaving wedding photography, that I’ve found myself stuck in a thought loop of “But I don’t know how to…” when it comes to figuring out what to do next or what I want to do “for work.” I don’t want to over-emphasize this project, or insinuate that it completely cured me of feeling stuck, but it did remind me that while I might not know exactly how to do something, I can figure it out, and figuring it out is easiest if I sit down and play with it, instead of just *thinking* about it, or worrying about all the ways I could screw it up, or get mired in feeling not qualified or skilled enough to do it.
And while it took six years total to complete them, if you add up all of the time they spent sitting in a box, plus the amount of time it took to actually fix them, I don’t regret holding on to these chairs until I became the person who could fix them. In some ways, waiting to fix them was the right choice – the hours of research and the months of working on other pieces of furniture were all useful and necessary and part of the process, even on the days when the story I was telling myself was that I had no idea what to do, how to do it, or that there was no way I’d ever be able to do it. One of the things I’m learning about myself is that I will arrive, just on my own time* (even when that time is far further in the future than I would like it to be right now).
And now that they are finished, I feel so much pride whenever I walk into the room where they live. I’m proud of the fact that these treasures were saved from a landfill, I love how they look in pink vegan leather, and I feel like I have a connection to the Eames’, because I have put at least as much love and energy into their design as they did :).
*Affirmation from You Were Born for This by Chani Nicholas