Saturday, February 24, 2018

DIY Couch Cushion Fix

Long time, no talk huh? Life has been crazy especially with cold and flu season upon us. I feel like I’m one more sick kid away from making my children leave the house in hazmat suits with a Purell shower waiting at home. 

Anyways, all those sick kids made it woefully apparently our couch wasn’t equipped for long days watching Netflix. Some background on our furniture. We bought a couch and two accent chairs from a local furniture shop about three years ago. The couch and one chair are the “Best Furniture” brand and the other chair is a “Pallister” This post has nothing to do with the Pallister chair. That thing looks amazing apart from cat induced thread pulling. (Cats are dicks) 

However, the other chair and couch did not fair as well in our home. After about a month of owning them, the cushions looked all sorts of lopsided. I contacted the local furniture shop and apparently the long time owner had decided to retire, and they were in the middle of some ownership changes. Translation: no one had any advice or offered any solutions to the lopsided cushions. I supposed that’s one downside of locally owned (although I feel like it’s really the exception not the rule).

Flash forward one year later, and the couch has pretty much fallen apart. The springs in the main part of the couch fell out completely. At that new development, I call the the local furniture shop, and they offered to come look at it. They had completed the ownership change and seemed to have their act (kinda) together at this point. So, they came over, flipped the couch over to look at the bottom, and the frame literally fell apart in their hands. They picked up the pieces and took the entire thing with them. 

They ended up completely rebuilding the frame and brought me back a like new couch....except for the cushions. Those pesky cushions were now out of warranty. I decided before we bought a completely new couch, it was worth trying some DIY on the cushions especially with a completely new frame and fairly nice upholstery. 


The fabric covers were in pretty good shape. The spring cores were surrounded by a foam cover which also seemed to be in pretty good shape. Once I opened up the foam cover, it was pretty clear why they were so uncomfortable. (And every single cushion was like this!)


So each spring has a "pocket" holding it in place which are attached with one another to create a grid of sorts. However, the material that was used to make these "pockets" is the same fabric as those $1.00 reusable shopping bags. In what world would that fabric decision make any sense? Some brilliant guy was like, "Hey, let's save some money and make this with fabric that is $0.01 per yard. I'm sure that cheap fabric will do great under high tension from springs." (Imagine that I am rolling my eyes high enough to make myself dizzy)

At this point I had a couple of different options I considered. I could completely scrap the cheap fabric and attempt to make my own pockets from a much higher quality fabric (I was thinking some sort of home dec fabric I had sitting around). I didn't love this option because it would mean extra sewing and I wasn't real confident in my ability to make them look uniform. I could just try to mend the current crap fabric, but I knew that would only last so long. After playing around with everything, I decided to do a hybrid approach. 

The first thing I did was get all those tangled springs back into a pocket. I used some upholstery thread (translation...higher strength) to hand sew each pocket in order to keep the spring in place. I stabbed myself with a needle about 200 times, but I got it done. 


After each spring was in the correct place, I took a heavy duty corduroy fabric I had sitting around to wrap the springs. Good thing about them being inside the cushion is the color and design of the fabric doesn't matter. My thought was this fabric will keep the springs in place by not allowing them to pop out the top nor out the side. So, I saved myself from making a completely new fabric structure, but still had the entire spring form wrapped in much higher quality fabric. 



After I had the spring forms fixed, I had to put them back into the cushion foam structure. I quickly found that the fabric and foam had been stretched far enough out of shape that the spring form wasn't enough to fill the space. I grabbed a bunch of batting and shredded foam to refill around the spring form. I put the batting around the spring form so you wouldn't feel the springs and then used the shredded foam around the sides of the spring form to fill out the cushions. 


Over-all the project wasn't too bad. I only had to buy the batting and foam which was around $50.00. I had the thread and fabric already. It took me about one night of three or so hours of work to get one cushion done. I had four cushions total to fix, so in about a week I had the couch in tip top shape. 








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