Wednesday, March 23, 2011

my first diy project.

*previous post, but linking up with the shabby nest frugal friday because i made this bench for about $30!!

so i have talked about before how when we bought our living room furniture, we bought it from a couple on craig's list who basically sold us everything in their living room for $300. what a deal! they had 3 tables, a tv stand, sofa and love seat. when we moved to georgia i realized our apartment is set up in such a way that our gigantic coffee table wasn't really going to fit in the living room. not very well anyway.. meaning if it was in there it would drive me nuts! (which it did.) so i got the bright idea (after having seen people do this on shows and things) to move the coffee table into my bedroom and make it into a bench/window seat. the table is big and very sturdy, so i knew it could handle it. so one day when i had some gift cards to hobby lobby and jo ann's (christmas presents, yay!) i took my sister and we decided to go for it! i took a pillow sham with me and compared it to tons of fabrics. everything was on sale because it was right after the holidays, so i got my fabric half off! i was pretty sure i wanted stripes since i already have a paisley pattern in my room:


now this project was a few months ago, before i turned into a world class blogger ; ) so i didn't take pictures all along the way. basically all i did was glue foam to the top of the coffee table (which i clearly did something wrong because instead of the foam gluing down it just absorbed the glue into itself.. haha funny, but frustrating!) then we stretched the fabric over top. we took a staple gun and stapled the fabric to the underside of the top of the table. when we got to the corners we kind of just folded them over like you would a present and stapled them like that. here is my lovely coffee table in my old apartment before:
yikes! those couches! thank God they are gone!

and after we made her into a bench (even though she put up a fight!):


ignore the fact that the pillows from my bed have double duty.. i have no pillow for the bench yet.. i am going to make one i think! we'll see... : )


i am really glad we did this! it didn't really take that long, and the most complicated thing about it was getting the foam to glue to the wood. but with my lovely sister's help, we did this in a couple hours. experienced diy-ers could do it much faster, i am sure of that! but, for my first big project i call it a success!

4 comments:

  1. this is a really cute idea! what kind of glue did you end up liking that worked?

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  2. haha well... the glue where we just try really hard to hold the foam in place because we had used wood glue, then we tried some gorilla glue.. and it was a mess of glue everywhere. we found that the foam just stayed pretty well anyway and it wasn't that big of a deal. and i didn't want to buy any more glue since my foam was being so greedy with it!

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  3. Thanks for stopping by my blog! I love love love this coffee table turned bench! I will be keeping that in my holster! I wonder if hot glue would've worked & not absorbed???

    natasha
    www.southerngirlsecrets.com

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  4. Beautiful! I saw your guest post at Neathering our Fest. It's too bad you can't paint your kitchen cabinets; I recently painted mine and I love how they turned out!

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