The irony is that mid-20th century furniture to Grandma was "new" and what she loved. The 19th century family hand-me-downs, the antiques, were old things that she disdained and gladly discarded seeing no value in them. When I swooned over the butter churn in the attic, Grandma couldn't understand my enthusiasm since to her it represented years of toil doing a tedious daily farm chore. The churn was given to me as a birthday gift. After decades of use and storage in perfect condition, it only took a few years in my home with a couple little kids and the lid was broken. I was ashamed.
So it only took a few years in our home for one of Grandma's well-used but perfectly fine rocking chairs to end up like this:
A couple weeks ago I stumbled on it in the barn where it has been stored and decided to send it out for a facelift. Repaired, it would fit well in our newly built guest bedroom.
There is a local upholstery business that I have heard about from friends. The proprietor works in a nondescript building down the highway, a place with no signage, no vehicles parked in the lot, and that otherwise looks like an unoccupied building. There are no regular hours and only a small neon "open" sign occasionally illuminated to indicate that there may be something there. The only way to know that it is a place where old furniture is transformed is to know someone that can reveal that secret. It is one of those locations that only the long-time locals knows about. Every piece I have seen recovered there was done with skill and creativity. I knew that was where I wanted to take Grandma's chair. I didn't know who the craftsman was but wanted to find out.
I found the phone number in the phone book only by recognizing the address. After several calls I finally got an answer by a woman with whom I made arrangements to bring my chair over. When I walked into the quiet building, the workroom was just as expected, dim and crowded with half a dozen projects in process, mostly sofas and chairs. Also crowding the space were work tables, old furniture and a wall of upholstery fabric on long rolls- hundreds of rolls stacked from floor to ceiling. It was in that stack of mostly old and unappealing fabrics that I found what I wanted for the chair in just a few minutes of searching.
I went into the project without any color preferences or firm ideas of what I wanted except that I knew I wanted the chair to have two fabrics- one a print and one a solid color.
And the upholstery craftswoman did a wonderful job combining those fabrics on Grandma's chair...
The upholsterer also stripped and refinished the wood without erasing the age and story the chair has to tell. Lots of extended family members have rested their hands on the arms of this chair.
