Philip Fibiger

We’ve definitely been on a post-wedding home kick the past month or so. After deciding that it would require far too much effort to move, we’ve been working on adding to and fixing up our apartment. In addition to trying to revitalize our garden, over the past two weeks we built a box valance to hide the industrial vertical blinds that our apartment came with, and reupholstered a chair of unknown vintage, but that was last reupholstered in Albany in 1976. The chair was in pretty bad shape, the fabric was pretty worn out, and I’d managed to cut myself when we were moving in and laid down a pretty good blood spatter on it.

The valance was pretty easy, Home Depot cut the 1×10 for us (I own no saw, that’s pretty sad), I assembled the valance while Emily cut out the batting and the fabric. Both the batting and fabric are just stapled to the valance frame, and then the velvet curtain was hemmed on a sewing machine and attached to the valance. Hung with four L brackets, It does a great job of covering the ugly aluminum paint splattered track for the vertical blinds.

The chair was more difficult, but still not too hard. Emily found some brown ultrasuede fabric (in the light the fabric looks different from the curtain) that was a pretty good deal. We laid the fabric over the existing chair, and then cut out panels of fabric to serve as the sides of the back cushion. Sewing the panels on to the main piece of fabric, I managed to sew a stitch through the plastic head of a pin. I didn’t even realize that was possible. Once it was sewn, it was slipped over the back of the chair, and then stapled to the underside. It looks a lot sleeker, and way less 70’s.

I think they turned out well, here’s a before and after shot of that part of the living room.