we finally finished the sofa.

Old upholstery is gross... almost too gross for me. We stated by taking the pieces all apart, and removing the dust cloth from the bottom.

c- We found the tag. The company now makes office furniture. While taking the upholstery off we found little bits of avocado green vinyl and a tag giving instructions for the original upholstery. The frame is teak.

d- It took hours to remove all of the staples and padding. We reused as much as we could. This is one half of the seating frame. The two pieces are completely separate and connected by screws to the frame.

The main cause of the sagging seat was a lack of enough springs. We decided to remove the springs altogether and replaced them with a wood base. It makes for a firmer seat, but it will last forever.

g- Here's the wooden base.

h- We put the cotton padding back down on it, as smooth as possible, and covered it with acrylic batting. We wrapped the edges around and stapled it to the back.

i - Did the same to the other side of the frame, and the other half.

j - The main covering pieces were not as complicated as they could have been. Each cover (one for the seat, one for the back) was made of four pieces sewn together to make a partial box. (The tricky back comes later.)

I know you probably wanted to see more of the covering process, but we had our hands full with shaping, staple gunning, and stretching. If you do a project like this yourself, make close notes about how the piece was upholstered in the first place. The professionals know best... really.

Anyways, it just took moments for the cats to be back on the upholstered pieces. I guess that's success?

k - The back portion was maybe the trickiest. We reused the tack-bars from the original. They were evil, dull, and bent but Patrick took care of them.

l - The tack bar had to be pushed into the side of the fabric, which was turned under. The top of this portion was stapled to the top of the piece (turned under) and then the tack bars were nailed in and stapled again at the bottom.

m - The result looked pretty good. I am glad to say we didn't crew anything up too much.

n - The two seat portions were screwed back into the frame and voila...

the cats have a new seat. They will defend it with their laser eyes.

and this is where is now sits, in our little entry way. Now I need a little coffee table....