DIY Project: Reupholster office chair

So here I am reupholstering for the first time an Office chair!

These are the Before and After pictures:

Below I describe the protocol used, with pictures of each step and materials used.

Protocol followed

Materials  Used:

For the fabric, I found a good web site that shows the amount to buy according with the type of chair. You can find it here. I used 10 mm as staples size, as you can see from the pictures. And these staples worked fine in both plastic and wood seats.
The process is quite easy, you can do it in five main steps!


Step 1.

Disassemble your chair office chair using your tools (you´ll mainly need a screwdriver to unscrew a few screws, so don’t get scared from the tools picture)

Step 2.

Detach the old fabric from the seats, and use it as model to cut the new fabric, so avoid cutting it.

Step 3.

Using the stapler-gun attach the new fabric to the seats.

Step 4.

Reassemble the chair with the seats now reupholstered.

Step 5

Enjoy a New Office chair!

These are the main steps. I found several blogs that have a few pics and detailled  explanations of each step, you can find these here and here.

I have to say that the tricky part of the process are the corners of the seats. We could have clean corners if we sew a string to the borders of the fabric and pull it, but since I still didn´t purchase any sewing machine, we just had to pull the fabric as tightly as possible, and staple it, as much as possible...
Even with the tricky corners I am very pleased with the results!

preparing for DIY weekend...

Finally today I received from Amazon the main tools to start my very first DIY project, my Stanley stapler gun and the staples to go with it. Tomorrow I will be purchasing in sales the reupholster fabric. Hope I am still on time because sales already started for some time now and most of the good items are gone. Let’s keep our hopes up! Anyways there’s always IKEA if it comes to it... So this weekend will be DIY time... 

Blogging about blogging

Third consecutive post, not bad I believe...!

 So, up until today my blog adventure is still an ongoing Project. After deciding on the main subject (which is about anything and everything), today I rearranged my blog´s the template. I am not sure if the rest of the bloggers had the same difficulties as I had, but I don´t find the tools to customize your templates user friendly, at least if you are not satisfied with the general aspects of the selected template. First, blogging become really serious! And I am not keen on hiring a web designer to do it, or buying a new one! However, when Googling  about blog templates, I got really useful contacts... if I decide to do precisely that. A few not so useful clicks after finally I got some helpful pointers, from slide shows about how to improve your blog design, blog articles (find it here and here) to you tube videos showing exactly how to do it. But in the end it is up to your taste (or to what your target audience is appealed by). For me is definitely up to what I identify with. Since this is still the beginning, later I can change my blogs template... 

What really got me surprised (or not)  with my web search, besides the amount of bloggers writing about blogs and blogging....(precisely what I am doing now), is the seriousness of the matter. When I first started to blog, and this was really ages ago, back in 2006 give or take, blogging was nothing more than a mere hobby. Everyone could start to blog (and at the time it was mostly teenagers who were doing it), and a boom of blogs got created. And I am not surprised, the number just kept on rising (if you wich to see a graph, click here). However, I am not sure if most of the blogs were kept active. Mine wasn´t for sure. I did created it, but only today I am actively writing on it (and lets see for how long). And as you can see by Nate Whitehill’s graph (whoever he is, sorry, I just did a quick search to support my theory) most of the blogs created were inactive quick afterwards (graph here). I am aware that there are professional bloggers around, but I believe that the mere hobby blogger is really serious about the quality that his blog presents. Otherwise the number of articles about how to blog, choosing your target audience, etc, etc etc that the professional bloggers write about....would not have any audience...I guess I am that audience! I did research about it. So theres sufficient target audience that wishes to post a professional blog... Not that I wish it, but I do want to have a appealing blog.... Or at least I am still working on it...

Growing

The very first post of my blog consists on a picture of my favourite tree, magnoliaxsoulangeana. My blog was named after this specie, which I find magnificent, because it is able to integrate beautifulness with sturdier characteristics as resilience and robustness. I intend my blog to follow similar characteristic, it is not planned to be beautiful, but interesting, and I hope to be able to continue to write it for some time, therefore following a resilience type. Let’s consider this another New Year resolution.

But writing a blog is not easier, we have to know what to write about, and if it is to be read by others, its contents have to be appealing. That’s the tricky thing I believe. We are able to find thousands and millions of blogs in the internet, and the subjects are diverse from personal to academia contents and now a day’s even authors develop a career just by blogging. Of course, I think that most of the blogs are... well let’s face it, we do find lots of trashy things on the Internet...

My blog will be a miscellanea of all the previous, and if I work it enough might be better than some. Some authors advocate the use of blogging for both professional and academic reasons, which is a fine valid reason, but only writing for scientific reasons would take the fun out of the blog. And I have to admit, I don´t find many blogs with masterful scientific contents. Don´t get me wrong, we do find really interesting things, but not to reference on your academic works, for that we should just keep using scientific journals and peer-reviewed (and even on some of the articles we have to keep our critical spirit well alive) and the typical scientific books. However, there are important benefits to consider, as auto-promotion, always be in touch with news, networking... which considerably helps you in your career.

 And just for personal contents? I don´t think anyone is here just for reading my melancholic and depressive writings. So let’s keep it diverse, miscellaneous, and we might get somewhere.  Similar to urban planning, mixed uses, the definitive way to be... That way it will also reflect my personality, that I consider to be ecletic, and in the end a blog is personal and mostly should reflect yourself and your thoughts.  This could get interesting, and who knows, I might have a future just by blogging?

New year, new resolutions

It has been ages since my last post...!
And here I found myself rewriting a new post, making sure that my New Year resolutions go beyond mere thoughts. At least they are written somewhere in the world wide web! And, who knows, perhaps some soul will even read it?
So we found ourselves in the year 2013, meaning either we will be living an auspicious year... or the complete opposite. However, it is still the beginning of the year, so let’s hope for the best!

As we are all aware, the year of 2012 is known for its economical catastrophe. And it means that we all should endower  however possible, and here we begin to find my very first resolution...grow my savings....! And along with it, goes another resolution which kind of goes against the first one, but deep down it still is an attempt to save money, instead of simply buying new furniture...

We all find some old furniture requiring replacements... So, I decided to Re-Upholster and old Office chair. So, the second resolution: DIY projects. Besides my office chair, I have some plastic armchairs that almost were thrown away. Until I decided to renew them. The way? With some covers.... Still a project which is definitely more expensive than simply throw away the armchairs, but still it seems to be a fun DIY project. Actually, with a simple google search, I found that, weirdly enough (or not) I am not the first one to attempt to learn how to sew some covers by themselves, and actually a mother of two earned some money by simply reinventing (and re-inventing because these types of covers were already available in the market) a cover that fitted all types of chairs. Not that I would be earning money through this, particularly because I have no idea how to sew, so you can all imagine how my first very first attempt will be like....What makes me all enthusiastic about this DIY project is that definitely I am not the first one to try this, and all around the world someone already did it by themselves, and looking by the pictures posted in the Internet, quite nicely. So if they were all able to do it, why can´t I? Soon enough we will all find out how it goes...The first catch with the project: Sewing machine... It is so expensive! And I need it for some medium fabrics, meaning...more expensive.  Maybe some good old soul will decide to offer one to me?

So as we can conclude, my first resolution is finding some obstacles to overcome... Well, the first DIY project  is certainly more easier, so let’s begin Re-Upholstering  the Office chair, which certainly is less expensive, and then well go from there. By the looks of it, I would still have to buy and stapler gun, and with a Quick Amazon browsing, it will cost me around 20£, still less expensive than a 100£ sewing machine….

Soon enough I will write about it!