New Creative Project

I have been holding onto this amazing old chair, lovingly referred to in our home as Pandora's Chair. No one actually can sit in the chair because our very old cat Pandora is always there and on the rare occasion that she get up to use her litter box or grab a mouth full of Iams, she is sure to leave behind enough fur to ruin anyone's pair of black pants. So, really, this chair has become a fancy cat bed that sits in our living room and gets uglier and more disgusting by the day. What a waste and a shame because the chair is actually quite beautiful, though not entirely my style!

Here's the vision! I am going to strip this chair down:

I'll strip and bleach the wood and have a fuchsia stain made up! I have seen a lot of pink stain and I've seen a lot of purple stain and if I mix them... I just know it will be happily magical! I'll re-stain and refinish the wood and then reupholster the chair using this material that I found at DIY Upholstery Supply!

Simple, right!

Since I'm not knowledgeable about upholstery in the least, understandably I do not have the tools necessary to do the job. Instead, I found a hammer and these pliers and screw driver to be priceless in the painstaking task of staple removal.

I didn't actually rip any of the fabric. Instead, I took out every staple and kept the fabric in as good a shape as possible so that I can use it as a pattern and reuse some of the hardware.

During the process of removing the upholstery, I couldn't even keep Pandora off of the chair!

I took a lot of pictures of every step of the process so that I can repiece the chair more easily . Anything that didn't seem obvious to me was snapped. Like this:

and this

And in the end, the chair looks like this:

Tomorrow I strip the wood and then I'll spend the next few days conditioning it! Then I'll stain and finally reupholster! This is such a fun project, but I am wondering how I'll keep Pandora off of the chair when I am done?