Bench Makeover!

Good Morning!

I did this project on the weekend, and I am SO pleased with how it turned out. When we moved into this apartment, we had this huge front entrance area (and no huge flight of stairs like the old place) that seemed so empty. It didn't take me long to figure out that I wanted a nice soft bench for the area. It's always nice to have someplace to sit for putting on shoes and to set stuff on. I took a little look at new ones at IKEA and Walmart and they were definitely more money than I wanted to spend. After finding blogs like Infarrantly Creative I felt totally inspired to do some sort of furniture makeover project and this seemed perfect. I figured that if I found a table that was the right size/height, that was stable, and that was cheap at a thrift store, that I would use that OR a bench from a thrift store. So I've been checking out the Salvation Army every week or two for the last month to see if there was anything. Last week there it was! An ugly little bench just waiting for me to take it home and make it cute. It was $5!

It was totally wobbly, but I figured that it could be dealt with. If not, well, it's just $5 right? I also noticed that the legs were slanted, which is totally an old coffee table thing and obviously not a great choice structurally for a bench, right? Well my suspicions were confirmed when I ripped off all the old fabric, but as far as I'm concerned, that's great because I didn't have to buy the foam! I didn't take a photo of the process, but there was about a million staples holding the old fabric in place and no seams. A big old piece of fabric was just tossed on, wrapped and stapled a million times.

So I grabbed some cute IKEA fabric that I bought last month and cut out a few pieces, sewed them together and put them on. I was lazy and didn't hem the edges, but I did fold them over on the bottom. I also didn't wrap the bottom because when I got the old fabric off I found another set of holes for the legs to screw into that were not slanted. Bonus! So my bench has straight legs which makes it a lot more stable. And I love the end result.

(I still need to repaint the legs, but you can't see how bad they are in the photo and I couldn't wait to show you!)