Flea Market Flip

I really love flea markets and I really love repurposing, "upcycling", or refinishing furniture. Which is an awesome combo to love because flea markets, garage sales, KSL.com, craigslist.org, or thrift stores are great places to find cheap rundown furniture that you can fix up and make your own.

I'm comfortable with painting and distressing furniture, but have no experience with sewing or reupholstering anything. I have a nasty wingback chair I desire to reupholster, but that's a more advance experience project I'm saving for another day. In the meantime, I'm looking for smaller and simpler projects to give me the experience I need with fabrics.

I found this cute little bench at the reclaimologist boutique a couple months ago. It's perfect for my entryway. I love it. But it was unfortunately upholstered. It simply would not due in it't current status. So I hopped online to and ordered up a faux dark brown leather, yellow and white chevron, and zebra prints.

First I removed the bench lid to make it easier to work with. Then, using pliers, hammer and flathead screwdriver, I removed the staples that held the offending fabric. I read a lot of upholstry blogs that say you can remove the staples simply with a butter knife. Those people are lairs. I ended up bending the tip of my butter knife and cursing angrily. What did work was using a hammer to gentle tap the flathead screwdriver under the staples and removing them that way. Even then some were more stubborn than others and only half of the staple would come out. In those cases I used the pliers to yank the rest out.

I discovered that underneath this awful fabric was an even more atrocious fabric. Also, who ever upholstered it put the offending fabric on inside-out. The underneath side of the fabric was clearly the side that was meant to be seen and not so bad looking, truth be told. Because I wanted an extra layer of padding, I left the original and atrocious layer of fabric, but doused it thoroughly with Lysol Disinfectant Spray. While that was drying, I used the piece of removed fabric as a pattern. I just laid it down on my leather fabric and cut out around it.

After the Lysol was dry and put my desired fabric on and began stapling it into place. Afterwards, I reattached the lid back onto the bench. I think I did a pretty darn good job for my first ever reupholstry project.

For my first sewing project I'm going to be making accent pillows for the bench out of the chevron and zebra print. That will be a different post for a different day though.