To Rejuvenate a Love Seat

OR 

      Reupholstery, Part 3

Well, on Friday night, one week after we started taking it apart, it was time to reupholster this love seat. So I turned on my 80's playlist, and got started.

Yes, you are seeing red. That is some fleece that we added
to help soften the wooden corners before we folded the
foam back over the frame.

The bottom of the couch did not have any fabric between the springs and the foam. I don't know why not; the back of the couch did. (We will see if this is standard, or if it was a mistake, when we do the next couch.) So the springs were cutting into the foam a bit. There were also spots where the foam folded over sharp corners and so tore a little bit. Bruce had sanded the sharp edges off of all the corners when he worked on the rest of the frame so, hopefully, that will ease some stress on the foam. He also stretched the denim over the seat springs.

A girl and her glue gun.

The first thing I did on this day was a little bit of foam-repair, using hot glue. (A trick I learned from puppet-making.) And then it was time to staple the foam back in place.

If I could see dents where the foam had been stapled before,
then I stapled it there (although not in the same ...staple holes/indentations). Otherwise... Nope.

Well, the deck piece was the last one off, so it was the first one to go back on.

Ah, look at that beautiful deck! ;-)

Lindsey tests it out.
(If you look, you can also see me—or my shadow—in this pic.)

After the deck, the shoulders, the back, the arms, etc.. I spent four or five hours stapling pieces in place on the first evening. Well, with dinner happening some time in the middle of it all.

Heh! Look at Ryan and me.    :-D

Ryan helped me with the first set of back cushions. They are stitched in-between two pieces of black fabric (which I was able to re-use). The open side of each cushion is stitched between the two black, back-pieces which then stretch over the back of the frame. (The cushions themselves have zippers on the underside, which is where/how the stuffing goes in. They required more padding—which I already had in the house.)

We put this back piece on with the seat cushions in place so there wouldn't be a gap between the two sets of cushions. Then I moved the seat cushions and covered the arms up, but my photographer apparently had had enough fun at this point.

I finished the last of the upholstering in the morning (the bottom-side panels, and padded out the upper back cushions and stapled them in place), in about three hours.Well, finished except for the back because I'm waiting for the tack strips I ordered from Amazon, and the webbing on the bottom isn't done because it goes on very last.

Doing the upholstery was a learning process. The big pieces, like the deck, were pretty obvious; you just start in the center and staple, and stretch, and staple toward the ends 'til it's all in place. But whenever I had two of anything to do (shoulder pieces, arms, etc.) the first side took me an hour or so to figure out, and then the second one only took about fifteen or twenty minutes. Which means the next couch should be done amazingly fast! Right?

All told, it probably took us about twenty-five hours to do the whole thing. Well, add another four to six hours if you count the time Bruce worked on the frame at the same time I was cutting out fabric. Twenty-five to thirty hours? I do think we can probably do the big couch in the same amount of—or maybe even a little less—time.

And now for the big reveal...

The Arm:

                 before                     and                        after

Side view:

Lookin' good!     :-)

As a side note, when I came up with the name for today's post I thought, Wouldn't it be nice to rejuvenate myself as quickly and easily as I did this couch?

Well...actually, no.

 I am getting wrinkly and a little saggy in places (although I don't need extra padding anywhere...well, maybe a couple of places...). But I don't think I want to have all my skin methodically pulled off, limb by limb, and then everything else stripped off, all the way down to my bones, only to be replaced in a week's time, stretching my skin (or a different skin––Ew!) back over it all. I think I will rejuvenate myself the old-fashioned way.

Anyway, here's the entire thing...

Before:

And after:

The big couch is next, then the chair, and then the ottoman. And then it will be like I got all new living room furniture! Yay!