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DH had the UGLIEST ripped up patch-wrok naugahide couch and armchair when we met. Bulky oak frame of un-shaped 2X4's and naugahide patches in various shades of brown and tan. OMG! they were SOOOO UGLY!!!! He got them in Minnesota about 10 years before we met. He had dropped out of college and was living on the streets in Minneapolis selling his blood for $, and hanging out in the computer lab programming. He was a good programmer and a professor got him a job at a software company. Don got a basement apartment and found this ugly furniture for free on the street in front of a fraternity house. Soon he wrote a piece of code for programmers that got the attention of Microsoft and he was hired there. They paid all moving expenses and packed the ugly furniture and moved it to Washington! They would have been better off giving hime the $ it cost them to move them! Anyways, years later when I met him, he lived in a beautiful house in woodinville that was empty except for this ugly furniture and ugly peach wall-paper and damaged peach mini-blinds (previous owner loved peach). By now the furniture had stories with them and sentimental value so he refused to part with them. He did well at microsoft, and had a huge office so I managed to talk him into taking the couch there for his team to sit on while they brainstormed. It wasn't there very long before it went missing. The powers that be had it hauled away one night. The next year, Don had taken all the vacation he'd saved up and went on a solo motorcycle trek around Australia. I had 6 weeks and my bonus of $1,400 to transform his house. The first thing I did was make new cushions for that chair (I was just going to re-cover, but you don't want to know what condition that foam was in when I got the cover off ... ewwww.) I stripped the entire chair down, sanded, painted, put in new springs, made new cushions. The I took all the blinds out the windows and sewed curtains. Lastly I tried stripping the ugly peach moire wallpaper out of the dining room - I was not aware that the builder had applied it directly to the sheet-rock without any dry-wall or primer between them. Oh crap. When I peeled, it exposed the chalky insides of the sheetrock. I tried several mothods of removing the paper in different spots,even with a rented steamer, and the all did the same. There was nothing I could do to repair it, so Don had to pay to have the room re-sheet-rocked when he returned. Ooops. The price for that was far more than my bonus!
With the new look to it, the chair no longer held its sentimental value, so we got a new couch and chair. The good thing was that Don so loved the curtains that he did not care about the damage I did to the dining room. He said he hated the peach blinds, found the color embarassing so he never had anyone over. (and he was not embarassed by the couch and chair!)
