"Let's Re-do That Footstool Tonight!" I said.

I actually got quite a number of little, piddly things done last night.  I re-aligned the strikeplate for the deadbolt on my back door, which was making it really hard (and frustrating!) to lock the door.  I cleaned up the kitchen, and re-organized a couple of the cabinets to make a new place to put my pots and pans (well, pot and pan. I'm not a huge cook).  I tightened the bolts on all my dining room chairs, since a couple of them had legs that were getting loose.  I took my liquid-sander to the pieces of that little side table I told you about the other day.

Then I decided to tackle that little footstool - the one I picked up at the same time as that side table.  I got the thing entirely torn down before I remembered that

1. I no longer have a staple gun, because my other one was such a piece of shit that I threw it away the last time I used it, promising myself I'd get a new one soon.  *crickets* 
2. My spray paint stock is woefully depleted - I'm down to like two drops of a turquoise that's way too bright, a couple of silvers, and a really gross, poopy brown color that I don't even remember buying

Yeah, there's no refinishing the wood on this thing.  And I can't finish the project without spray paint and a new staple gun, but at least it's torn down and ready to re-boot.  In the meantime, let's talk about what a galloping piece of shit this footstool turned out to be: 

Clockwise from top left: 

1. First of all, the sides are laminate.  Crappy laminate.  Peeling, cracking laminate.  Sigh.  
2. And the laminate isn't even the same *color* as the stained wooden legs.  What?!?
3. It's not even MDF underneath.  It's pressboard.  UGH. 
4. The piece de résistance: one of the legs once split, and was "repaired" really, really badly.  Basically someone just squirted glue all over it and hoped for the best.  The leg was stuck to the frame, and some of the scrim cloth from the bottom of the upholstered top was glued to the wood.  This glue job will hold, but it'll never hold weight.  There goes the idea of this being my new piano stool. 

Then there's the seat itself.  First of all, under the wood was a bunch of crap and leaves and shit.  Spiderwebs, dead bugs...this thing must've been in a garage or storeroom for a looooong time.  

The scrim covering the bottom of the seat was glued in place all the way around - I had to rip the thing to shreds to get it off, and to get at the staples underneath. 

Speaking of staples...was this really necessary?!  Every corner was like this.  Most of the staples aren't even IN the fabric.  

HAHA FUCKERS. 

Was it the busted leg, or this nastiness, that made the previous owner chuck this damned thing?  This is GROSS.  The foam and fabric aren't just dirty - this is MOLD.  EWWWW FUCKING EW.  Into the garbage with both pieces.  

But wait! 

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! What the crap!?  This is three pieces of...scrap!...glued to a thin piece of luan to form the base board of the seat.  The largest piece has a hold milled out of it - it looks like a piece left over from building an Ikea piece the wrong way.  The other bit is a drawer front, I'm pretty sure.  The dark strip along the end - I have no idea WHAT that thing is, but the wood-tone on it is a strip of corrugated plastic with a laminate wood-grain backing.  Seriously, what the hell.  

So, I have three options: 

1. Replace the foam and fabric, paint the frame and legs, and make a new footstool out of this. 
2. Paint the frame and legs, create a new top for it with no upholstery, and maybe use it as a very small table somewhere, probably out on the back porch.
3. Chuck all the pieces and call it an exercise in whatever the reverse of "don't judge a book by its cover" is. 

LOL.  Wow. 

.

Day Sofa Cover Achievement: Unlocked

Before

Um...no. 

To' up, salvaged,  foam couch cushions "cleverly" concealed  by an old white matelassé blanket.  Not that I don't love the blanket - I adore it, actually.  I've had it since high school, but it's long since become too stiff to sleep under at night.




During

First step:  corral all those foam cushions into one long mattress for the sofa with a fitted cover made from an old sheet.:

apologies for the weird angle. 

After

Blanket turned cover!

apologies for the night picture.  :/ 

Yes, it's all floppy.  I wanted it that way.  All I did was fold the blanket in half lengthwise, pin around one edge and one end, sew it, and then slip it on like a pillowcase and fold the open end inside.  (1) I wanted the scalloped edge of the blanket to show, because that's one of my favorite things about it, and (2) when I get done dressing this thing up with pillows, put the back on, and rearrange the furniture the way I'm thinking of doing, it'll end up looking like a piled-up little daybed in the corner here.  :) 

Next:  a lamp! 

.

SEE I TOLD YOU

One last dining room chair - an Ikea KAUSTBY.  This is the one I use at my computer desk at home.  I'd say I got tired of sitting on an un-cushioned seat, but I pretty much never did.  I got tired of stealing couch pillows to put on the seat, and then having them all butt-shaped after a couple of weeks.

While I was upholstering the dining room chairs (for the actual dining room), I went ahead and did this one, too, with a scrap of heavy drapery fabric I got from a friend in a de-stash:

Tr-drrr. 

The end.

.

Dining Room Chairs - Paint Job and Upholstered Seats

The sack cloth upholstery thing has been going on for a while now.  I've always loved the look, but didn't really think much about it because where do you even get sack cloth, anyway? Turns out the answer to that is "from your friend's late grandmother fabric stash that she left behind."  Muchas gracias to said friend for the metric buttload of fabric she sent me home with a few weeks ago.  :)

That stack of fabric included several pieces of both cotton and linen sackcloth, some of which was still printed with lettering and logos - they were landscaping product sacks of some kind, once upon a time.

And so....

Before

Seat removed, frame cleaned, then deglossed with Liquid Sander, and finally painted with a plain black semi-gloss latex paint, with a 1.5" china brush with ragged tips, for that streaky wood-grain look I adore painting with.

The overall effect looks black at a glance, but up close it's a deep, deep espresso-brown and black "stain."

Covering the seats with the cotton sackcloth and eggcrate foam (which I happened to have a bunch of sitting around, left over from old projects).

One chair finished!

I did three of the set of four today.  I actually can't find the rest of my foam!  I know it's around here somewhere.  Soon as I find it I'll get the fourth chair done, lol.

I think when I do find the rest of my foam I'll put a seat cushion on the little Ikea dining room chair that I use at my computer desk, as well.  I'm tired of sitting on a throw pillow to blog.

Before & after comparison.

The dining room table is black, and I keep a rough, white, linen tablecloth on it.  These will coordinate much better.











All of the sackcloths I had were different prints.  So what?  I think it's cute that they're mismatched.  The third one, not pictured, has a simple print of black text;  the fabric for the fourth chair is the same, but the text is different, and placed differently on the cushion.

After

Resurrection of the Day Sofa

I didn't waste any time putting my World Market sofa back together when that hardware came in the mail.  It  took longer to bring the frame pieces in from the garage than it took to put the arms onto the base.  The back, though, not so much.  Turns out they've tweaked the design of this thing just a tad since I bought mine, and the bolts for the back didn't fit quite right.  They'll be easily replaced at Home Depot on the way home from work later this week, though.

The next step was to create a cushion for the thing (see previous post).

Enter  (1) two salvaged couch seat cushions and (2) an electric turkey knife.  No, I'm not kidding.  A serrated blade cuts foam really well, but a hand-held one leaves little bits and chunks.  Two fast,  reciprocating, serrated blades cut through this stuff like buttah.

cat-approved

Once both cushions were split into four, I cut two of them down to fit the arms of the couch (a little longer, actually, so that the entire finished cushion would be long enough when the couch was laid out flat):

notice the Jiffy Pop Method of  cat deterrent for plants in the background. 

Next step is the cover.  That's going to be made from a cotton upholstery twill that was, actually, once another couch cover - the cover for the seat of the couch, actually, which I had first made into a cushion for this sofa, LOL.  The fabric is in great shape, though it's a tad discolored, as old as it is (and as many dogs as have sat on this couch.  It took a long time to train them to stay off the furniture when no one was looking!)  The inside, however, is still nice and fresh-looking.

The basic idea is a variation of this:

source

The seat cover I'm using is already mostly sewn.  I just have to trim the seams and flip it inside out, shorten it a bit, and throw a zipper into one side.

More on that when it's done. :)


.

Folding Sofa, Lightly Used, Needs New Cushions

You know what else I want in the living room?  This:

This is World Market's "Studio Day Sofa" (actually a photo of the slipcover they sell for it in "Mallard", which I guess is a color now, and not a duck.  Looks teal to me).

I have one, actually - or rather, I have the frame.  Long ago, back when I was newly divorced and possessed of a house with no furniture in it, I picked one of these up as a floor-model markdown for cheap.  While it was fantastic for one person to sit on, it didn't make even adequate main seating.  More than one person could sit on it if it was folded out (both arms lay down flat), but if one person got up, the other person was dumped onto the floor as the whole thing seesaw'd up into the air on the vacant end, since the feet are so close to the middle when folded out.  Whoops.

That said, I think it would make a fantastic auxiliary piece for extra seating, or for an out-of-the-way little reading nook type of thing.  It would be a great replacement for that dumb little Ikea mini-couch thing I picked up for free intending to spruce up but never did.  It's smallish (62"x33"), low enough to feel divan-esque (only 25" high at the back), and awesomely versatile.

The problem is that the cushion that came with this thing was thin enough that I could feel the wooden frame through it. I replaced it with a thicker, firmer cushion that I made from an old couch cushion, but when I retired the sofa to the garage for storage, I got rid of the cushion I'd made (one of my dogs had been sleeping on it while I was at work, and it was, erm, a bit funky).

Once I've got a new seat cushion for it (Ikea has a thin mattress I think I can work with, for only about sixty dollars), and some nifty throw pillows, I plan to put this thing into action again in place of the mini-couch.

Also World Market.  Also in "Mallard."  I have several of
these in different colors, including this one.  Looks teal to me.  

right?  

.

A Wildebeest!

 The "after" shot to yesterday's "before": 

Well, okay, I guess that was "during" shot.  Or, if you want to get technical about it, it's an "Oh, crap, I forgot to take a 'before' picture! Where's my phone?" picture.

This cute, pretty much pointless little footstool was a $5 find at Goodwill a couple of weekends ago that I finally found a couple of hours to re-upholster this week. Violets and roses out, red velvet in!  (Red velvet, I might add, that I bought a 2-yard swath of from a friend for a dollar at her garage sale. Woot!  The brown gimp around the edge was a remnant from a costume I made in January).

D'oh! I took the pic before I brushed it smooth.

Just a wee bit of scenery to stow in a corner.  It's still on my sewing table at the moment, until I decide where to put it (I actually bought it to take SCA-camping with me, tee-hee).

There's probably a cat on it as we speak.

.

OMG SHE POSTED SOMETHING.

But wait!  What's this?? 

 

***drumrollllllllllllll***

.

Wildebeests: The Minicouch From Beyond the Curb (Part I)

Hey, remember this guy?

free Ikea minicouch!

Oh, yeah, by the way, I'm back from vacation.  It kinda sucked, actually.  MOVING ON...

*poke*

So, Homecouch had a bit of an issue with the right arm being...flaccid?   Hollow! No padding?!  I mean, how does that happen when there's no tear in the fabric for the stuffing to come out of?  WHERE DID THE STUFFING GO??

SCARY

I cut the stitching on the seam of the cover and peeled it back to reveal a gaping chasm rimmed with shattered bits of MDF and hardboard...

And this, waaaaay at the bottom.

The slab of MDF nailed to the hardboard frame had split and fallen down inside the arm.  Given the tiny footprints on the seat of this thing, I suspect someone was walking or jumping on it and broke through.

All I had to do was fit the broken piece back into place and secure it with glue and some heavy-duty staples.  Once it was solid, I tucked the foam and batting back over the arm where it belonged, and sewed the seam back up:  

Yes, the stitching shows.  No, it's not the same kind of stitch on the rest of the couch.  Nor do I care, since this will be covered when it's done anyway.

But for now:  functional minicouch arm! 

I also started cleaning it this week.  Surface stuff, so far;  later this week the upholstery actually needs to be scrubbed and brushed.  After that, I'll add a wooden base and some feet, to raise it off the ground, and then make an awesome cover for it.



.

By the way...

 There! Happy now? JEEZ.    Just kidding.  :)  This is the whole couch-cover that I made from Ikea curtains.  Ta-da!  Down-filled cushions = floppy cushions no matter how much I try to straighten them out.

View of the "whole" living room - the main seating area, anyway.  The cat is Evie - I guess she thought this particular photo shoot was a bit lacking in the feline element.

And here's the Majesty Palm I picked up the other day for ten dollars.  :)