Refurbishing Furniture... Green or Not?

It seems like I am spending a lot of time fixing up my furniture instead of buying new furniture.  Due to problems with mold & mildew - I have to sand and fix up the back of my antique mahogany armoire.  I'm regularly re-doing the 6' high kitty condo with new hemp rope & indoor outdoor carpet.

Sun damage on the arm in 2005 or so - within the next year, the seat cushion between 

the black pillow and the kitty started to shred parallel to the length of the sofa.

Enter - the problem of the sofa.  I bought it in 1998 or 1999 at Z Gallerie on Union St in SF.  I loved this sofa to bits.  It started showing sun damage on the fabric around 5 years of age, and by 8 or 9, the fabric on the seat was starting to fall apart and I kept it covered with a throw for well over a year before I realized that it needed to be recovered.  

Of course I already thought of recovering it myself OR making a slipcover.  Recovering the sofa would mean taking a class - which wasn't available. Being a single arm sofa would make it easier but there are all sorts of things that I just didn't know about - like how do you get the trim that is tacked around the whole sofa?  How do you pleat the arm? What do you use to do all this? I know using my little heavy duty stapler would NOT be the answer - if it couldn't hold fabric and hemp rope onto a kitty condo for the long term, what good are 3/4" staples going to be on a sofa?

Making a slipcover - for a single arm sofa? Come on!  How ridiculous would that even look?  At a certain point - I realized that if I tried recovering it myself or making a slipcover - it would look like pure shit.  Some things are better left to the professionals.  However, I thought I would save money by looking for eco-friendly fabrics.

Bamboo is freaking expensive and is not available in upholstery weights when I looked.
After months of trying gave up on trying to find eco-friendly/sustainable/organic type of upholstery fabric, I gave up.  From what I have read online, it seems like those fabrics are not not available to consumer and what's available to trade is more than $50/yard.  At Britex, I bought a polyester ultrasuede for $19/yard to cover my sofa.  Getting someone to do the recovering seems to be ridiculously expensive - it's a one-arm chaise and I was getting prices anywhere from $500 to $800.  The damned thing cost $750 new!


I finally settled on a guy from craigslist who is charging $525 to recover my sofa - fabric cost over $100.  It would be just as "cheap" to replace. Why does it cost so much to do the right thing?  Is recovering the sofa the "right" thing?  I have had it for over 10 years, afterall.

The finished result - note how the trim at the lower right/front leg is drooping - I had to tack it up with a stapler.

As it turns out - I was right.  The Craigslist guy had tools that I didn't have or even imagine..  The stapler he used had very very long staples that were narrow and thin.  While he did the work on the chaise in my own backyard, he made all the trim in the shop.  In the end, the guy didn't do such a great job. 

 

Though he still did better than I, the front of the single arm on the chaise didn't look right at all and there were plenty of bumps and such. I totally fell out of love with it in its new color (went from a red brocade which fell apart from sun damage & use after 7 years and which I draped for another 3) to a light grey-green.

I ended up selling it to a friend who admired it very much and almost covered the costs of fabric and recovering it.

Green Genes?

Earlier this evening, someone posed the question to me about where I had my inspiration for my interest in sustainability and the environment. Like most people, it's been a long transition and awakening and much of my life experiences have steered me to the place where I live today, intellectually and emotionally, on environmental issues.

As a child, my parents decided they wanted to raise their kids in a place in the country where they could have animals and be outdoors. This was during the energy crisis in the 70s, which overlapped with a multi-year drought in Northern California and the oil crisis. As I child, I remember a constant barrage of messages about conserving electricity by shutting out lights and turning off appliances, reducing what you threw in the trash, and the incipient term "ecology." I participated in I was a Camp Fire Girl and an occasional 4-H member (though we had cats, dogs and a pony - no real livestock).

For many years, my dad and mom "built" the house and we had no electricity (PG&E didn't have enough customers in our part of rural Napa County at the time + neighbors who were miffed at not being able to purchase our lot = kerosene lamps, gas generator & batteries). Because of the drought, we didn't even have a well -- we used an old fire truck to haul non-potable water to a tank above the house and had gravity fed water for showers and washing dishes. For drinking water, we went to pipes sticking out of the rocks on the side of the road (which now have signs "non-potable water") and filled big 5 gallon jugs with cold spring water. We used an outdoor toilet that was cleaned regularly by the sanitation company. We didn't even have carpet indoors.

We had a creek running through the property and lots of animals (domestic and wild). We collected all our cash deposit bottles and cans and took them into town. But we burned our trash. My brother was always the most enthusiastic to execute this chore, though we all relished the opportunity to play with fire. My father would dig a big hole with his backhoe and we'd put trash in there for weeks and then burn it and cover it up. As far as I know, he still burns his trash. I always remember thinking, "There's something wrong with this."

After my parents divorced, we all lived with my mom's parents for the better part of a year. We loved this idea - we always loved visiting them on their urban homestead. They had a 150 year old house in a Cleveland suburb that was near a Metro Park and in the middle of a big tract of undeveloped trees along with a few other houses. They had walls of blackberry bushes that kept us busy for hours in the summer.

My grandmother's experiences in frugality during the Great Depression -- being in a middle class family that had to economize, nicely complemented my grandad's working class (think coal miners from England) Quaker upbringing. They were frugal, considered how they were going to use things, preserved and conserved food, material, and everything in their environment.

My grandad kept bees for honey and to pollinate his big vegetable and flower gardens. His was not just a garden - but a big, extensive garden intended to provide most of the vegetables in the warm months and supplement as much as possible in the cooler months. He kept root vegetables in the root cellar, saved seeds and sprouted his own seedlings. My grandmother canned applesauce from the two apple trees.

My grandparents never just threw things away. They always sorted their waste -- they composted all food scraps. Any clothing not fit for wear became rags, scraps for quilts or went to charity. My grandmother never threw out plastic containers -- she saved them relentlessly (even after she was in assisted living, she saved them "just in case"). She baked and canned, clipped coupons and every few weeks they would go fill up gallon glass jugs with natural spring water in a park as their "Sunday Drive." They bought in bulk when they visited friends and family in Amish Country.

My stepdad was also a good influence with a strong practice of frugality and conservation. We kept the heat low, turned out lights and turned off appliances to keep energy bills down. We did not waste food (though incoming mail sometimes ended up in the freezer).

Through college, I lived with someone who was a hunter and in the building trades -- we were surprisingly compatible on issues of conservation and preservation of nature. My studies through college were focused on developing nations with a lot of focus on workers rights, sustainability, grassroots movements, the environment and politics. After grad school, I got into "the Internet" after moving back to the Bay Area. I remember the first time I saw someone reusing plastic bags for bulk food purchases -- my friend's sister Marina and her partner were getting ready to head to Rainbow sometime in 1997 and I thought, "wow! what a great idea!" (it's true - it all starts with the bags!).

In the past year, I have converted my landlord to put all his food waste into the green bin and am slowly educating him about what goes into the recycling bin, and my boyfriend now keeps a pail in his kitchen for food scraps and has gotten very gung-ho about his own garden.

Earlier this year, I discovered my neighbor Beth's "Fake Plastic Fish" blog and have been exploring a whole world of green blogs. In the last couple of months I have been learning a lot of ways to cut down on the amount of plastics that I consume, from buying bulk toilet paper wrapped in paper to making my own liquid laundry detergent and even some changes in the hair washing department are imminent. Crunchy Chicken even has me going along with one of her crazy challenges for fertilizing my garden.

Everything is a learning process - you can't learn everything all at once. I even find that if I do a bit too much exploring, it can be really depressing and will make my head explode.

We're in a fix - and there are a lot of things we can do to improve the situation of the planet. If I've learned anything it is that people are more easily lead gradually and on their own than by being dragged. I just wish we could get thing stirred up a bit more quickly...