Q. What's worse than having nails driven into chair joints for securing loose joints? A. Corrugated fasteners
Friend's channel chair she inherited from her Grandmother. Repair and reupholster.
On almost all the joints, which were loose, someone drove corrugated fasteners into the joints. Some aspects of the wood frame were broken, probably because of and why the joints became loosened, broken and/or separated. Nails were also used in some places. Was able to remove all nails and some C fasteners.
SWMBO works at a Day Hab for adults with disabilities. Due to Covid, they shut down the day habs for a few months so she switched to helping out at group homes. So far she's brought home 3 dining room chairs that needed repair. They were built with those corner brackets with allen-head bolts into threaded inserts. Apparently no one cared enough to tighten them when they got loose and just kept using the chairs. Eventually they wobbled so much that most of the glue joints let go and in some cases the stretchers actually fell out. Not very safe for able bodied adults, never mind those with physical disabilities. A law suit waiting to happen.
Your dismantled picture looks very familiar. :-)
Speaking of reupholstering, what do think one might pay to have a chair like this reupholstered with a decent fabric or maybe even leather? It's well built chair from the late 40's, maybe early 50's. Weight-wise, it approaches 50 lbs.
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(The timing of your post was perfect. I was planning on pinging you and asking that question.)
I charge only for my labor, doesn't include cost of fabric. I measure for calculating fabric yardage, but the decorator & customer does the fabric aspect. For full size chairs - recliners, fully upholstered Bergere chairs, arm chairs, wingback chairs, etc. - I charge a flat labor fee $650. That's what I would charge for your chair.... appears to be full size. I don't nit pick with itemizing or valuating different details of these types of furniture, as some upholsters, here, do.... examples: I don't add charges for decorative nails, skirts, arm covers, buttons, buttons equate to tufts/tufting. I rarely charge for installing new padding and such when an older piece needs it.... foam is the exception. Cotton and fiberfill padding is really cheap, so I rarely charge for replacing these. Foam is comparatively expensive. I buy replacement foam and the decorator/customer reimburses me.... I don't sell or mark up the cost of/for foam/supplies. I'm not in business, as other upholsters are, so I don't charge for these individual internal type applications or supplies.
When I discover old padding needing refreshing, I tell the customer and show them pics or show them in person. Same with the loose or broken wood structure, when there are issues with these. When I measure a piece ( to calculate fabric yardage needed) I also inspect for loose joints and the like. I inform the customer of the findings and update any subsequent issues I may discover, later. For small, minor wood repair, I usually don't charge to do the repairs..... as with upholstery, woodworking is a hobby, not a business. Doing small repairs for free is the neighborly thing to do.
I've upholstered pieces where someone covered over existing fabric . They didn't remove the old fabric. Also, there have been examples of someone not replacing or repairing some internal aspect... they just covered over it. To me, that's skimping on doing the proper job. I'd never know what charges were applied to such work or why it was done that way.
I work with 4 decorators, here, with mostly high end customers. Often times they don't care of the cost.... " Just do it and send me the bill".
*With one elderly wealthy lady, almost every other year we (decorator and I) go from room to room reupholstering almost all her furniture. Once I reupholstered her wingback chair and ottoman and 3 weeks later she called and said she found some prettier fabric, so I reupholstered again.
If someone gives me $K of work, I'm not going to charge for additional (discovered) minor padding/labor-repairs or such.
The only comparative example of fees charged, with respect to this area (Louisiana) and your area (New York) may be: An online friend (from AOL's long ago message boards), in the Washington DC area, had a chair caned for something like $900.... woven cane, not pressed-in cane. He asked me about my fee to cane the chair. My fee would have been about $600. Caners have their own fee per hole to be caned/woven. My hole fee is $2.75 per hole, average for this area. That DC caner's fee was obviously higher. Upholstery fees in your area may be different than those in this area of the country.
Probably more info than you wanted, but hope this helps. Sonny
You had me at $650. I assume that includes shipping to and from Louisiana. ;-)
Just speculating, but prices in the DC area might be comparable to NYC. I live in western NY, near the shores of Lake Ontario. I'll ask around, but I'm guessing our professional costs are probably mid-way between the professional cost of $900 in DC and your hobby cost of $650.
Thanks for the info. The details help in understanding the different add-on cost that I might run into.
I am a pro, certified upholsterer, schooled for 2.5 yrs. I just don't work as a business. My labor fees are higher than some upholsterers here.
Note: Many upholsterers charge by the yard-of-fabric to be installed, not as I do by the categorized piece of furniture. These upholsterers will quote their total price based on the number of yards, needed, times their per-yard fee . Average fee-per-yard, here, is $65. One upholsterer, here, charges $85 per yard. Example: Their fee for upholstering 2 (simple) rap & tack dining seats (0.6 yards) is about $25 per seat. I charge $45 for one seat, no matter what the yardage.
I suspect, but I don't know for sure, some upholsterers, here, who price their services by the yard, that way, will also note, to the customer, additional costs for buttons, tufts, skirts, decorative nails, etc. Seems these other costs for additional "features" are, somewhat, mentioned on the sly to the customer. My suspicions are based on some comments I've heard from some of my customers who have had other upholstering experiences.
However, someone who calculates their estimate/quote by cost-per-yard may very well be less expensive than someone who will quote based on a categorized piece of furniture.
No offense intended. I used the word "hobby" based on this statement:
"as with upholstery, woodworking is a hobby, not a business."
My use of "professional cost" vs "hobby cost" was nothing more than a comparison of a place like Acadiana Upholstery vs. "Sonny's Workshop". :-)
Yep, that's what I expect also, maybe even that phone call a day later once they've taken the piece apart. (Similar to what I just heard from someone who recently had a roof put on. She agreed on the price, ~$12K. Once they started tearing the old roof off, the boss-man knocks on the door and says: "You have no sheathing, just 1 x 6 boards with big gaps. If I don't put sheathing down, I can't guarantee the roof. It'll be $4K additional if you want the sheathing. Ouch!)
I can see something like that happening once they've rendered the furniture unusable.
I noticed that there are several houses in our neighborhood getting new roofs. The oldest of the houses is 13YO, so I thought it odd. My roof looks pretty good, "huh". On my daily walk I ran into one of the owners and asked her about needing a new roof already (same floorplan as mine and same age, though I have a basement). She said that a roofing company cold called them and said they could get their insurance to pay for a new roof. They then inspected the roof. Of course the insurance company laughed at them.
The first rain a bunch of shingle pieces came down with the water (another "huh"). She said that they got for or five estimates running from 11K to 62K! The 11K was from this same company (another "huh"). They seemed to do a decent job and replaced a couple of sheets of sheathing, so...
Then I noticed a bunch of other houses in the neighborhood all getting new roofs. After 13 years? I also noticed the sign out front was for the same company (a flock more "huhs").
Me thinks there's something untoward afoot here (fraud anyone?).
I understand why you wrote this analogy. But to kind of stick up for the roofer wanting $4000 more for sheathing. I can think of quoting a job for a new kitchen for instance. Then during demolition while taking out the old cabinets and floor and drywall/plaster you discover old lead or galvanized plumbing pipes and knob and tube electrical wiring. You go back to the customer and say the old quote for $10,000 for a new kitchen is now increased because you discovered you have to spend $3000 extra for plumbing and $2000 extra for wiring. And the old subfloor is 1x6 planks and it would be so much better to put in flat smooth plywood instead of trying to reuse the old planking for flooring. Add $1000 extra. So I understand the roofer quoting based on initial inspection and assuming it was good sheathing underneath. And then discovering the current roof sheathing is unacceptable and has to be replaced. Extra cost beyond the initial quote. Based on the age/look of a house, you assume (with some risk) that certain things/standards were used when the house was built. And then you discover your assumption was wrong. 1950s house. You would assume copper wiring? But maybe they used aluminum wiring.
'Pends on what the original roof was--that's what this house has and doesn't need nor should it have solid sheathing. But, it's wood shingle, not asphalt.
No argument that things are often found afterwards, things that could increase the cost. That said, let me give you a few more details about this particular situation and how there was a better way to handle the situation.
My out-of-town daughter closed on house a couple of weeks ago and we spent a week with her doing stuff around the house before she moved in. Once of the things we did was have a few contractors over for estimates for some gutter work, chimney work and to get an assessment of the roof. Coincidentally, her new neighbor (the lady we're talking about) was having a roof put on that week. We did not know that when we were getting our estimates.
Both roofing contractors that looked at my daughter's house asked us the same thing: "Do you know if there is sheathing under the current roof? With houses of this age (85 YO) we often find that there is no sheathing." We had to answer "No". The attic is 90% finished and the small areas that are not have spray foam insulation, so we can't see the underside of the roof. Both contractors told us that they would break the quote up into line items, one of which would be for "Sheathing, as needed", with a max price if the entire roof needed to be sheathed. Basically a "price per sheet" quote.
That's how you handle a situation like this. You be honest and upfront about as many possible issues that you can perceive.
After the job was over and the neighbor was telling us about the extra $4K, she told us that no one mentioned the possibility of needing sheathing or how the lack of sheathing would mean no warranty. No one asked about the roof, no one asked to see the attic. It wasn't until the roof was mostly torn off that they dropped the $4K bad news on her. At least my daughter knows up front about the possibility of the extra cost.
(To add insult to injury, the crew next door used some of the sheathing material to build a ramp to get material onto a lower part of the roof. When the owner came outside, she saw a couple of full sheets of sheathing sticking out of the top of the dumpster - part of her $4K tossed in the garbage. They also apparently did such a great job measuring the roof that there was not one single shingle left over. That's some real talent.)
The house was roofed with asphalt, before and after the recent re-roof.
My roof is sheathed with 1 x 6 T&G boards. Nice tight joints. When it was re-roofed a few years ago, the roofer replaced a few areas with plywood, but there was no need for a full re-sheathing. The house mentioned in this discussion had huge, uneven gaps between most boards. I have no idea how they even nailed the previous roof down.
The owner said it really needed to be replaced but I hadn't taken a good look at it, having been focused on my daughter's "new" (85 YO) house that she had just closed on. I only noticed the boards because I was showing it to my daughter so she understood what could possibly be under her roof.
My father built our house in '59 and had 1xs (I want to say 1x12s) instead of sheathing, w/asphalt shingles. I'd like to have a pile of boards like that today.
I helped build a 2 story "cabin" in the woods as a "summer vacation". The roof was sheathed with plywood, but the exterior walls were sheathed with 1 x 8's on the diagonal. Other than the plywood, all of the wood used to build the cabin was cut and milled on the guy's land.
He had 2 enclosed outhouses for privacy, but he also had a "open seat" with a short back wall, set on the top of a hill looking out over a valley. As the user sat facing the valley, the wall hid their backside. Anyone approaching from the camping area could see that the facility was in use and wait their turn.
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