Recovered Chest

This is the colour my mother affectionately calls “calf shit brown”.

It matched our carpet, and that is not a good thing.

The vinyl, unfortunately, was held on by more staples than the population of Beijing. If you wiggle the screwdriver completely underneath the staple and jerk it up hard, it’ll come flying out. However, our lounge room carpet is big and shaggy and vacuum-resistant, and I didn’t want to spend the next six months on my stomach with a pair of tweezers and a magnifying glass. Instead, I did it the slow way – popping each staple half out with a screwdriver and yanking the rest with pliers. I spent hours doing this, until I felt like a sadistic dentist and even a lecture on the laws regarding boundary fences seemed like an exciting alternative. Eventually I went ‘meh, what am I, Anthropologie?’ and yanked the vinyl off, leaving the rest of the staples in.

After painting the bottom, I removed the hinges and recovered the top with regular cotton material. It wrinkles a little when somebody sits on it – you really have to pull the material tight when you’re stapling, like you’re trying to win a tug-of-war or somebody’s trying to take your last bag of Doritos.

I’m not sure why I didn’t paint it brown to match the tree trunks, but I think this may have been around the time that a friend hid the tin because every time I saw it I started lamenting about all the things I could have bought with that money (“twenty-two double cheeseburgers and an apple pie!”)