Upholstering a sofa can be a simple task that could help you give a better touch to your living room, which without a doubt, will help you create a much more attractive sofa than that old sofa you have at home.
Upholstering something is putting a special fabric on top of a piece of furniture, which is usually filled with foam. In this way, two things are accomplished. First of all, we are going to make the sofa and the furniture that we have upholstered look great, with a fabric that makes it have a spectacular design.
Secondly, upholstering a sofa aims to improve its comfort, since an upholstered fabric is always padded on a sofa and for this reason, it could help you get a comfortable upholstered sofa of the highest quality.
Upholstering a sofa is an expensive task, which is done by the typical upholsterer who passes by houses from time to time and says a message about upholstering chairs, armchairs, rocking chairs… which we all know. The upholsterer does it very well, however, you could get upholstered the sofa quite expensive.
The good news is that we ourselves will be able to upholster the sofa, believe it or not. Actually, what we are going to do is remove the old fabric, re-foam if necessary, and finally, we are going to put the new fabric and engrave it correctly on the sofa, thus completely changing its aesthetics.
This task will take time, since above all you will have to find a good upholstery fabric and you will have to disassemble the sofa. However, once you have finished, you will notice all this as something that will undoubtedly have been worth it, since an upholstered sofa is much more beautiful than one without upholstery.
If you do not know how to upholster a sofa, you are undoubtedly in the right place, since we are going to learn step by step how to upholster a sofa in the correct way.
Instructions for upholstering a sofa
- Disassemble the sofa starting from the outside:
The first thing you should know is that the sofa must be disassembled in order to be able to upholster it correctly, since an upholstery must be done part by part. For this reason, we are going to have to disassemble the sofa, something that we are going to do starting from the outside. We are going to check if our sofa has some joints to be able to remove it or if we have to tear the boards (later we will have to glue them). In any case, you should start on the outside, removing first the arms of the sofa, second all the cushions and finally the back cushion and the bottom of the sofa. Do this in this order and try not to break the sofa. In addition to this, you must make sure that you remember how the sofa was disassembled, for the simple reason that later you will have to reassemble it and if you do not know how to do it, you will have done all the work of disassembling and reupholstering the sofa in vain, so that you go memorizing step by step what you have been doing, since then there will be no doubt. - Removing the old upholstery:
Now that we have disassembled the sofa part by part and, therefore, we have it perfectly separated and differentiated part by part, we are going to eliminate the old upholstery. If it is a sofa with covers, this is going to be very easy, since all we are going to have to do is open the zipper and expose the foam, something that will save us a lot of work. However, most of the sofas or armchairs are already upholstered from before, so we are going to have to remove the old upholstery. For this, we are going to take a pair of scissors and break it little by little, until removing all the fabric from them. Now we must leave everything aside and leave the foam there, since we are going to need it later and it is the part that we are going to cover with new fabric. Make sure you remove all the old upholstery before putting anything new, because if we put it on top of it in any way, - Put the fabric and the padding if necessary:
Now that we have finished removing all the old upholstery, we are going to start putting the new upholstery, which we are going to put in order to replace the old one. We are going to do this by first placing the fabric on top of the key places, such as the cushions. In addition to this, we are going to check the state of the cushion and the foam, since we are going to upholster, we are going to do things correctly. If the cushion and the cushion foam is in poor condition, we could replace the foam with new quality foam or replace the entire cushion, as long as it is the same size as your sofa and fits correctly. Once everything is changed, we are going to project the fabric on each part, that is, to cover the entire part with fabric and leave it like that, something that we are going to do before stapling and cutting, since that way we will be able to check easy and free way how is all this and in this way, - Staple everything in order:
Now that we have everything well projected and positioned, we are going to staple everything in order, that is, take a stapler and start placing the staples on our part. Once we have done it, each part will be upholstered and we will be able to cut the excess fabric. We are going to make sure that the fabric that is left over does not leave any dangling remains, that is, that the fabric that is left over from the staples is as little as possible. This must be done in all the parts that we are going to upholster, trying to check first how everything has turned out to see if the fabric will have to be changed or if with this we are going to have an upholstered sofa in the correct way. Now we can assemble, since we will have finished upholstering. - Join the sofa:
Now it is the turn to join the sofa again, but this time instead of doing it as when we disassembled it, we are going to do it exactly the other way around, that is, we are going to put the central parts in the first place as the cushions and the bottom and then the sides. Once we’re done with all of this, we’re going to check that the boards are ok and put everything back together. If you’ve broken something, you can fix it with glue if it’s not a very expensive repair, and if not, you’ll have to buy another board. - Enjoy and take care of the new upholstery:
Finally, we have finished upholstering our sofa and for this reason, we will be able to enjoy it with all our family and friends. However, now it’s time to take good care of it, since so many hours of work should not be in vain and should be able to last many many years.