I Had an Ugly Bench: Now It Looks a Little Better

Does anyone care what I did with this bench?

Since you’re reading this blog, we’re going to go ahead with the assumption that you all care about it desperately.

(Blogs are seriously weird.)

I acquired this extraordinary piece of furniture when I bought my vanity from a consignment store. It was essentially free. I was all set with the price for the vanity, but when I went to take it out of the store they said: “Hold up!  This is a two-part set!”

We scoured the store for a matching piece and finally they had to check all the tags to figure out that this bench came with it. Strange, because it doesn’t match at all!

Still, it is about the right height, and since I didn’t have another seat to use instead I just got accustomed to it. My approach to dealing with the disintegrating upholstery? Cover it with a blanket!

I held out on fixing it for a while due to laziness and a vague idea that I would find an amazing old rug or vintage woven fabric so I could re-cover it all bohemian and awesome. But those things didn’t present themselves to me, so finally Sage talked me into going to a fabric store for something nice to use in the meantime.

It is a nice solid piece, so I knew it would fix up well. The first thing I did was remove the seat, which was just held on by some rusty screws.

I then wiped the frame down with some Howard Retore-A-Finish (affiliate link – read our policies) and Feed-N-Wax (affiliate link – read our policies). We love this stuff and have bragged about it before when fixing up an old set of drawers and vintage mid-century chairs.

The bench frame was already in pretty good shape, but the Howard’s products filed in some scratches and slightly upped the tone and shine.

I don’t know why anyone would need a seat reupholstery tutorial from me, since you can literally get one ON ANY BLOG EVER, but I took the pictures, so here you go. To reupholster the seat, I first removed all the old material and pulled out all the rusty staples that had been holding it together.

I had been considering getting a good piece of foam to make it extra comfortable, but ultimately decided to just cut a cushion out of some batting since that is what I had available. I cut four layers to the size of the seat, and then a larger piece to wrap around the edges and staple.

I bought an actual working staple gun (affiliate link – read our policies) for this project, which was a great improvement over the old rusty one we had hanging around.

I then cut the fabric to have an extra 3-4″ on either side and stapled it tightly around the cushion.

I popped it on the frame, screwed it in place, and tah-dah!

The room looks considerably better than it did before.

The bench is much more comfortable to sit on (which is pretty much the whole point of a bench) and it has the same color palette as my DIY yarn wall hanging.  I also now get to use the blanket I had covering it up for other more blanket-like uses.  It’s like a free blanket!

It feels really nice to have finally tackled this small project. It took maybe an hour to revitalize the frame and do the seat.  I don’t know why I waited so long!

 

(Sharing at Your Turn to Shine, Think and Make Thursdays, and Link Party Palooza)