Too many staples

Ready?  The couch destruction went fast, only about three hours.  Maybe because this is our fourth upholstery project, maybe because we left some of the previous layers (and by some I mean a lot).  Before pulling everything off, we took out a permanent marker and wrote on each piece what it was, which side was left/right/up/down, and what order it came off.  We were going to use the old pieces as patterns for cutting out the new pieces, which we've done in the past, but this ended up not being necessary because the pieces were almost all rectangles shaped with a pleat here and there.  One thing we did this time which made it easier than previous projects: cut all the pieces much larger than necessary, then staple them down and cut back everything is stapled down.  On previous projects we cut all the pieces to exact size and then didn't have enough fabric to grab when stapling.

Part of the reason we left some of the pieces was that we found previous layers of upholstery, and it amused us to layer over it.  It's been reupholstered at least once before, which I think is a good sign of the frame's longevity (and when we opened it up, the frame, foam, belting and spring ties all looked in good shape, so we didn't have to do any tune up there.)  The oldest layer of the couch looks like it was some pink and metallic gold brocade, and without pulling everything off, it felt like the first layer might have been actually tufted instead of mock tufted like the yellow layer.  

What's tufting?  It's the buttons on the front of the couch, which usually anchor decorative pleating.  Here's what it looks like from the back.  We ultimately decided not to tuft the reupholstered version, but we took lots of photos to document things as they came off.

After getting everything stripped down as far as it was going to go, we draped everything we own in plastic and painted the legs.  

Here's the finished legs, which are maybe my favorite part of the whole couch now.  

Ultimately the legs (and the cushion) took the longest of the whole project--the drying time alone took longer than it did to rip up the couch or to recover it.  Demolition took about four hours, recovering took about eight hours, including dinner and stapler replacement breaks.  There's still some details that need to be finished, but pictures of the recovered couch will go up tomorrow.