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copyright ©1999-2007 |
furniture
facelift: 70s
lounge chairs part
two (vinyl chair repairs) by
Yee-Fan Sun | 1 2 3 4
continued from page 3 The spots on the chair arm actually worked out a bit better. As the arm was a very flat surface, and the nicks were quite small, the patches actually did perform more or less as they had on my test; I was left with a nice smooth bit of red vinyl where there had previously been some gashes. However, in getting overly confident with my iron on one of the repairs, I had decided to try applying the entire side of the iron rather than just the tip, to speed up the curing process. This, it turned out, was a very bad idea, as I managed to iron an uncovered section of the vinyl of the arm and create some oh-so-lovely bubbles in what had previously been perfectly good upholstery. For this mishap, I had no one to blame but myself. More problematic, however, was that I soon found that while the repairs had looked fine when I’d done them – the night before – when I took a closer peek in the broad light of day, that perfect red match wasn’t so perfect. Mixing a custom color wouldn’t have fixed the problem either: my red was simply a much more saturated, red-red than the version that came with my kit.
check out part one of this article: chrome cures! o check
out these related articles: ---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home. |
Left: Before (top) and
after (bottom) of arm repairs. Above: Before (top) and after
(bottom) of seat repairs.
The
final verdict on DIY vinyl upholstery repair: it might be better
than a big ol’
tear, but to get your chair really looking shiny-new, there’s no
substitute for actually reupholstering. That, sadly, would require
a significant additional invesment of effort and money, more than
I’ll likely be willing to put in for an inexpensive Craigslist find.
Still,
as
small
tears
and gashes have a tendency to grow bigger with time, I’m glad I
patched up my chair’s problem areas, as it should at least prevent
most of
the cracks and nicks from getting too much larger. Meanwhile, from
a distance at least, the chair does look better, with no more white
upholstery foam poking through. It’s not perfect, but hey, for
$15 and a couple hours of work, maybe better is good enough.