The first step after you get your chair should be to photograph it from all angles. As you take your old upholstery fabric off, you should also photograph each step to use later when putting on the new fabric. ​

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Remove the back piece first by removing the small nails or tacks that hold it in place. I used a flathead screwdriver to lift the old nails out enough to remove them with a needle-nose pliers. Keep the fabric as intact as you can and pin it to a piece of scrap fabric to use as a template for the new fabric. When tracing the old fabric, be sure to give an extra couple inches of excess around the old piece. Since the fabric gets trimmed after it is already on the chair, you will need the extra to make sure it fits properly.

I made sure to take close up photos of areas I thought may be tricky when reassembling the upholstery, and generally at each stage took photos from relevant angles to help me put it back together later.

​After you remove the back, front, and seat fabric, you can decide whether or not to keep the old batting or replace it. I chose to keep the original batting.

At this stage, it is optional for you to sand and re-stain the exposed wood on the chair. I started off with a medium-grit sandpaper (about 150) and when I was down to the exposed wood, switched to a higher (200+) grit until I was happy with the results. I wrapped sandpaper around a needle-nose pliers to get into the tricky spots and details. Putting down plastic tarp on the batting can help keep sawdust and wood stain from getting into the cushions, but you can always remove them instead. With chairs made before the 1950s, there is usually hay or horsehair under the batting and it can be difficult to separate without making a mess, so this is a nice alternative option. After you have sanded and stained your chair, you can start putting the new fabric on.

I started with the seat since it was the last thing I took off. Using the new fabric I cut from the old pieces, I could then reverse the steps I took to deconstruct the chair. This part can be tricky and fabric pins will be your best friend. Many fabric stores do offer upholstery twist screws to hold thicker fabric in place as you form it over the chair, but straight pins worked fine for me. The new fabric may not be a perfect fit, so use caution when trimming it to fit around the legs so you don’t take too much off. I used a staple gun to attach the bottom, folding as needed to get a tight fit. I found that squaring up and securing the front edge first allowed me to pull the fabric taut and more squarely secure the rest (it took a few tries). Keeping those bits of plastic tarp between the legs and cushion helped the fabric slide into place easier as well.

After the seat and front are on, the last piece of upholstery you put on should be the back section. After carefully pinning it into place, you can use decorative tacks to secure it, or you can use small nails. I found sewing tape to work nicely to help space the tacks evenly as I could pin the tape measure directly to the chair. As a tip, you can use a needle-nose pliers to hold the decorative tacks in place straight, so they don’t bend out of shape when you hammer them in.

The last step in finishing your chair is to add an optional Cambric Dust cover underneath the chair using a staple gun.

Once the black wax was done, Kathy wasn't 100% sure if the caning was what the buffet needed. While the texture was a welcome addition, the color hid the decorative drawer pulls. In a best-of-both-worlds approach, Kathy ended up painting the caning black.

Projects like these are a delight to see. Sometimes at the ReStore it's easy to overlook roughed up and well-used things in favor of newer, cleaner options. But now? Now it's clear that this piece of furniture was well-made and worth the time and effort Kathy put into it. Hopefully it will last her daughter a good long while. And who knows? Maybe someday way in the future it will turn up in another ReStore looking worse for the wear, just waiting for another creative individual to work their magic!

So, after 2 years of using a free Craigslist loveseat in our living room, I decided it was peeling too much to stay anymore. As is traditional in my house, I dismantled it. I saved the pleather and foam for future sewing projects, stuck the frame in my garage with the intention of using it to make a shelf, and then turned my attention to what to put in its place. 

Thus was born The Coffee Seat: a bench made out of a coffee table. 

Now, I am under no delusion that I invented the concept myself, nor that it's  novel in any way. What made the Coffee Seat special in my personal history of craft projects is that I thought of it, bought the coffee table at the ReStore, and in two hours had a completed bench. I invested $15 in the coffee table; the rest of the supplies I had on hand! ​

We love seeing things our customers have refinished! Here are a couple of projects folks have sent in for us to show-off. There's a lot of drab-to-fab opportunities at the ReStore; you just have to put in some elbow grease and creativity! 

AFTER

Here's a secret I probably shouldn't share, but I'm going to anyway. Why? Because the more of us that do this one little thing, the less stuff that ends up in the landfill.

Secret: Most chairs and barstools are ridiculously easy to recover. I'm not kidding! 9/10 chairs, just flip them over, unscrew 4-5 screws, and off pops the seat. Then, with some fabric (something sturdy, preferably), a stapler, and a bit of finesse, you have a new look for an old seat!

The main thing to look out for is if there's too much fabric on the cushion to go cover it with the new fabric, in which case you just need to grab a flathead screwdriver and pry out the old staples and remove the upholstery. Heck, if you get that far, you could always add more foam to the seat if you need it to be cushier! 

When stapling on the new fabric, be sure to start by anchoring it on each side before moving around the entire perimeter. That way the fabric is pulled taut in every direction and you avoid a big bunch of material when you make it around the circle (or square).

Here's a barstool I recovered before it hit the floor in the ReStore. I timed myself refinishing it, and including the time it took me to track down my supplies, it took a mere fifteen minutes. 

​My favorite part of this project is that the new fabric came from a couch that wasn't up to ReStore standards. We had to let the couch go, but I squirreled the cushions away knowing that someday the perfectly-good-pleather would come in handy.

I'm telling you, it's too simple! 
-Kali Brokaw

Sometimes we get strangely mundane donations at the ReStore. A while ago, we received a bunch of solid-core doors from the Franciscan Sisters. When I say a bunch, I mean a BUNCH. We're talking 50+ doors, all of them weighing at least 40lbs. While we have sold a fair number of them, we have yet to clear them out. There's only so many people in this town with heavy-door needs.

Now, an obvious use for a thick door like this is a workbench top. I didn't really need a workbench, though. What I really needed was a garden bed.

I have a ton of plants, but I rarely get to enjoy the literal fruits of my labor; the rabbits are happy to do that for me. I've known for years I wanted a really tall garden bed to keep my produce safe, and these doors helped me do just that. It turned out so well, my parents asked me to make a pair for them as well!

My project started with a very tall wall (14’) in the room where people enter my home. My home is a 1906 farmhouse where I grew up, and then it was my mother’s home most of my adult life. In the early 1970s the old farmhouse got an addition and the front room was designed to fit a piece of furniture that my grandfather saved from a home he was working on. The piece was a 9’ tall dark mahogany, carved wood, marble topped, mirrored sideboard with heavy religions themes. 

If you've been shopping at the ReStore in the past year, you've likely seen these wardrobes. This excellent donation from a local business has been a staple on our salesfloor for a while.

​Now a few of them are playing a role behind-the-scenes! We needed some aesthetically pleasing storage space in our meeting room, and I knew the wardrobes would do the trick.

​If you've been looking for some quick, easy storage solutions, these wardrobes are an awesome, sturdy solution. I've also been eyeing them up for potential garden tool storage. I think they might be just the right size to hold dormant rakes, spades, and post-hole-diggers during these cold winter months.

You could probably hang clothes in them too, I suppose.

​-Kali