Friday, December 24, 2010

My Newest Project - Part 1 of...

I hate my couch. There, I said it.
Let me clarify a bit. I hate the state of my couch. It's dirty. It's fraying at the edges.  The couch itself is great. We were given the set - couch, chair and ottoman - by some friends when they got a new couch.  I thought then that I could "easily reupholster" it. Not one of my brighter thoughts I know. If my mom and my aunt can spend a drunken weekend reupholstering a couch and have it turn out great I can do it, too. Right?
I have been hit with an urge to nest lately that would send even the most non-OCD person into a tizzy.  So I look around my house and see all the things that need to be done. Plus, we are trying really hard to move to another state and transfer Doug's job (more on that in another post I'm sure).  That has me in a moving mindset. Not a good place for a nesting preggo to be. All I can do is look around and see the things that need to be organized, donated, updated or cleaned.  The fact that I'm not on anything stronger than Welbutrin is a miracle.
So the couch has been taunting me. There's only so much I can do with it. I can't scrub it. I could but it wouldn't do much could. Who is the dumbass that makes white couches anyway?  We talked about getting new couches and realized that it just wasn't practical.  We could spend $500 and go to the cheap furniture stores and get something that looks nice, but won't last but a couple of years. We have four full size people, soon to have two little kids, two dogs and two cats. Our furniture receives a pretty good beating.  We could go to somewhere like Thomasville or Broyhill and spend $2000 plus on a good set of furniture and hope to get eight years out of it.  Quite honestly, the thought of spending $2000 on anything right now is not something I'm interested in. And I do like our couches. I like the shapes, I like the style. They're deep enough to be comfortable for my long-legged husband. They're comfy. They're long enough that Doug can actually lay down on them and not be uncomfortable. Plus, if you take the back cushions off they're perfect for us to lay together and watch a movie, or for someone to sleep on if we have a surprise overnight guest. OK, like that last one ever happens, but it could. So, to my frugal way of thinking, why get rid of a perfectly good couch when I can just recover it?
Is it going to look new? Probably not. Showroom quality? No friggin' way. But it's something that will work for our family and not cost a ton of money.  So I made the decision to reupholster it and started the research.  If you know me you know that I've spent HOURS on the internet reading and shopping and soaking up everything I could possibly find out about reupholstering furniture.  I thought about just making a slipcover and realized that it'd probably be less work just to actually cover the whole thing - so scrap that idea.  Then I started researching fabric and pricing the stuff. Holy tapestry, Batman! That stuff is expensive. I'm looking at roughly 20 - 25 yards of fabric. Good upholstery fabric can run anywhere from about $10 a yard UP! WAY UP. Like $30+ a yard up. Screw a bunch of that! So I started to look at how to bring down the cost without sacrificing the quality.  
Insert trumpets here...Coupons! D'uh. Did you really think I'd get into this project without coupons?  JoAnn's fabric runs 50% off coupons pretty frequently. And the cotton duck fabric is usually about $10 a yard - so really $5 a yard. That I can handle. I found a good spot in the budget to pull the money out of and yesterday headed off to the fabric store. Now, I had a basic idea in mind. I wanted a chocolate brown for the couch itself.  Then something in a blue to go with the beach-y theme that I'm trying to pull off in my living room.  I didn't have anything really set in stone, but I know what I like and I'm pretty good putting colors together so off I went.   I ended up with 10 yards of a chocolate brown duck for the couch, and 5 yards of steel blue for the chair. I bought a big floral blue/tan swirly thing for the ottoman. Of course, sometime over the course of the project I decided to use the floral that I bought for the ottoman for the cushions on the sofa.  It all pulls together nicely.
We'll see what the finished product look like!  Lots of pictures to come.

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