Naomi – Author at Plaster & Disaster

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)

As you almost certainly remember (because we talk about it constantly), last month we created an award winning side table out of a thrift store fuzzy plastic cactus:

Since then, it seems like cactus projects are appearing everywhere. Either we’re major trendsetters, or we’re just noticing more now that we have cacti on the mind (it’s almost certainly the former).

Because we’re apparently not the only people doing awesome things inspired by these prickly plants, we thought we’d share a roundup of some other cool cactus projects we’ve come across in case you, too, have caught the cactus bug. Plus global warming is coming for all of us, so we may as well get used to desert conditions (except those of us living on the coast — we’ll have plenty of water to drink live under).

Note: at the risk of being ejected from DIY blogland, we’ve excluded succulents.

First up, we obviously have to start with someone who has “cactus” in their blog name: Babs, from Patchwork Cactus. Her tutorial for creating hand stamped fabric is awesome:

From Patchwork Cactus (please pin from original source)

And you could personalize this in so many ways, like adding a splash of color to mimic flowers on some of the cacti.

For those of us with such a black thumb that we manage to kill even cacti, here’s the perfect project from the blog El Nido de Mama Gallina, which uses painted stones to imitate real plants:

From El Nido de Mama Gallina (please pin from original source)

No one looks at a cactus and thinks, “mmmmm, that looks tasty!” Until now, that is. Here’s a project from Alana Jones-Mann that manages to make even cacti look delicious with these insanely amazing cupcakes:

From Alana Jones-Mann (please pin from original source)

Also, why do tomatoes have a monopoly on the pincushion market? Cactus pincushions are so much better. There are loads of crochet tutorials out there, but we particularly love this sewn cactus pincushion by Anna over at Plan B.

Cactus pincushion by Anna Evers - planb.annaevers.com - Plaster & Disaster

From Plan B (please pin from original source)

Did you know that you could make your own neon lights? We sure didn’t, until we saw this amazing DIY Neon Cactus Light by Lindsay over at Shrimp Salad Circus using electroluminescent (say that 5 times fast) wire.

DIY Neon Cactus Light by Shrimp Salad Circus www.shrimpsaladcircus.com - Plaster & Disaster

From Shrimp Salad Circus (please pin from original source)

Finally, Casey from Vitamini Handmade is a woman after our own hearts, who was presented with plastic cacti and decided to transform them with spray paint. She turned tiny plastic figures from the craft store into faux porcelain ring holders. So cute!

Faux porcelain cactus ring holder by Vitamini Handmade www.vitaminihandmade.com - Plaster & Disaster

From Vitamini Handmade (please pin from original source)

What an extraordinary trend we’ve launched!

Wait, you say some of those projects are from before our groundbreaking cactus table victory, and that we were merely jumping on the trend that had already begun?

Details.