Love Seat Reupholstering!

Hello! I have been busy working on the little love seat I mentioned here - and it is OH SO CLOSE to being finished! 

I wanted to start sharing my reupholstering adventure and how I did it. I started a lot of research online on reupholstering and even spoke to a very helpful man at a local shop. I was very intimidated to get started, it is quite a project, and from everything I read online striping the piece down to its bare form is 75% of the battle. 

This is the first of five posts on this project - I thought about the best way to accurately describe how I went about it and explain my process. 

The next steps are:

Refinishing the Legs

How to Make Piping

Tufting!

Reupholstering

BUT first things first - lets remove all of the OLD and bring on the new :)

I decided to remove all of the old foam and batting too - it is over 100 years old and worn out... Not to mention it smells a little off..

*** Be sure to take a bunch of pictures not only in the beginning but as you go**

Here was my starting point:
 [Baby thinks this is for her]

I started by removing the black dust cover on the bottom.
As you go - keep a list of the order in which you removed the parts - it will help with the reassembly.
AND remove the staples as carefully as possible - the old fabric will be the pattern for your new fabric and save a ton of time.

To remove the staples I used this handy little guy [borrowed from my dad - but any hardware store sells them] and a pair of needle nose pliers.

This is tedious work - there are literally thousands of staples.

The next step was removing the back:
 Be sure to keep track of how each piece was stapled on. The back sides used a tack strip which I saved.

Then the side panels 

After the back and the sides were moved I had a general understanding of how the piece was put together initially and wasn't so intimidated. 

Now that the basic parts were removed it was time to move on to the next step:

The seat - the front of the seat had two rows of piping with a band to create a nice finish on the front meaning lots of staples.

The cardboard strips along the edges help to keep the fabric in a nice straight and clean line when stapling.

Once I had the seat removed the back part was very easy to remove.

The most difficult part of this process for me was the arms. There was alot of curves, nail heads, and tight spaces. 

Curve ease was used along the wing back portion - I saved this as well since it was such a small strip.

Getting so close:

The last part was going through and removing any missed staples, broken staples, and pieces of the fiberfill that was used as a padding.

With the broken staples that were too small to pull out with plier I tacked in with a hammer and lightly sanded the bare wood with a 320 grit to smooth out any rough edges.

TaDaaaa:

SO crazy to see it down to its bare frame.. kinda nutso that this is what furniture starts with!
Every reupholstery project is different - I am going to tackle this wing backed, tufted, and nail head studded love seat :)