Working for a Living, huh...Imagine That?

This weekend I signed up to do an upholstery class. I have a chair from my grandparents' basement that I love muchly...but so do moths. And my oh my, they have had their way with it...

There is nothing so terrifying to me as the prospect of a moth invasion...except a cockroach invasion. It's the horror of knowing that if you see 1 = 10,000 you can't see...!

Love meeeeeeee...!

Stay away, moth-chair!

So, once a moth infestation was uncovered, I bagged that chair in plastic drop cloths and mothballs. But mothballs smell bad. Really bad. Like, I'm-going-to-throw-up-and-I-can't-sleep bad... So I started looking into getting it reupholstered.


It's turns out that shit is expensive. The average quote was $550 for labour, and an estimated $300 for materials. And they quoted fabric as $50-$70 a yard (3.5 yards for the chair).

This was...unappealing.

So by the power of greyskull google, I found Re:Style Studio. They offer a "Bring Your Own Piece" upholstery workshop for $225, plus cost of foam etc (cost me $67). You need to bring your own fabric, but I was able to find what I wanted for $12.99/yard instead of $50-$70/yard...much preferable.



After roughly 16 hours of labour, I birthed a whole new chair into the world.

Me gustaaaaaaaaa

My hands ached, my arms ached, my back ached, hell, even the arches of my feet hurt. This was WORK. Suddenly I realized what "working for a living" was actually supposed to mean. I feel like an asshole when I say "I'm going to work!" and I sit at a desk all day, broken only by walking to the kitchen for coffee...coffee I don't even grind.

I hate sitting, immobile, for hours on end. Give me a job swinging a hammer, or ripping out staples any day! How can you put any feeling of accomplishment on sitting on your ass, tapping at a keyboard? There's no physical product for the work I do, one flood in the office and everything I've ever worked on would disappear. It's all immaterial.

Maybe there's something to be said for a hard day's work, and the satisfaction of holding something you made in your hands...hell, I guess that's why trailer trash have so many babies...it's an easy way to feel like you've contributed...

But how the hell would I make money redoing chairs? The cost of studio space alone (at $3/sq ft you're doing well), and the cost of equipment would be killer...

But maybe, somewhere in my future is a little workshop, shared with friends, a happy dog, and piles of tools and half-finished projects.


Yea, I like that. Hell, it'd barely even be work. ^_^