Sunday, November 16, 2014

Indoor Furniture

Over the years people have often asked that I take on commissions for indoor furniture.   I have always refused for a variety of reasons but the latest person to ask has been pushy and would not take "no" for an answer - my husband.  The furniture in our home has not been upgraded over the years because our 4 children were young and we figured that new stuff would end up getting abused.  With our youngest about to turn 11 my husband has been asking for new living room and dining room sets - I have decided to give in.

The living room set will be an easy one.  Both my husband and I love Morris furniture.  I have all of the patterns and jigs for this for one of my outdoor offerings.  For indoor furniture I will be using pine finished with a spar varnish.  I have a bunch of pine left over from a farm house project we did, and lots of spar varnish on hand also.  I have made a Morris chair in pine a few years ago, I like the weight and with a conditioner it turned out beautiful.  Here is a picture of it:

My indoor set will consist of two chairs and a triple-wide sofa version.  I am in the process of exploring options for cushions.  I have come to learn that cushion foam for the sofa alone will be more than $500.  This is basically more than 3 times the value of the wood - unacceptable really.  I have looked at other options for cushions including wool.  A few years ago a neighbour up at the farm asked that we bring some wool to market for him.  Since we were coming back to the city and the local buyer was not that far away from our house we said sure.  We went to his farm with our 7' by 14' enclosed trailer and filled it so tight that we could barely get the doors closed.  We then brought it to the depot and dropped it off.  It was a little out of our way but it was easy for us to accommodate.  Next time we met the neighbour we asked if he wanted us to bring more down for him.  He said that he had just received a cheque for $80 - not enough o pay for the gas (not that we asked).  Having remembered this my husband called the wool buyer and asked for a quote on cleaned wool.  Much to our surprise we found out that it would cost about $1500 to buy enough clean wool to stuff our cushions.  I am in the process of figuring out how to clean wool myself - I would be happy to buy it from a local farmer for way more than the buyer would pay...  I will blog about my wool cleaning experiences at a later date.

In any event the project starts tomorrow and I will post pictures as I work my way through it.

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