Like so many rooms in our home, our baby boy's has collected a few repurposed pieces that have floated around for years. I was charmed by this strange, vintage, adjustable footstool (that somehow cannot be made to look clean) during a flea market visit quite awhile ago. I bought it for $5 and clutched it happily the rest of the trip, protecting it from Kristie's (understandably?) dubious glances.
It migrated to our bedroom's reading nook, and then eventually became that spot where the clothes that are too dirty to put back away but still too clean to wash yet start to pile up. We moved it to the nursery after deciding that that would save us having to buy a new ottoman to go with the rocking chair.
But that whole never-looking-clean thing started to bug me. We do have a few vintage accents in our son's room (I'll share the whole thing when it's finished – still some art left to hang), but this just looked...old. I decided to try reupholstering for the very first time.
I used:
- A staple gun
- 1 yard of faux suede fabric
- Gold spray paint
(And by "I" I mean Kristie and me. She's so good at this stuff.)
We took the footstool apart with a screwdriver, and Kristie spray-painted the legs a newer-looking gold that matches the reading lamp next to the rocking chair.
With the cushion face down on the fabric, I cut a wide berth in the faux suede – enough to wrap around and underneath the cushion, and then some.
Sort of like wrapping a present, I stretched the fabric around the cushion (folding it as neatly as I could at the corners) and held it in place while Kristie carefully applied staples. We did this on all four sides.
Then we used a drill to make new holes through the fabric into the wooden frame, and reattached the legs once they'd dried completely.
This isn't a life-changing DIY. It didn't take much time, and required no Googling. But it looks much neater and more polished than before, I think. Another item happily crossed off the baby to-do list!
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