With construction wrapped up on the sunroom, all that’s left is the cleaning and unpacking. Also, the reupholstering, because you simply cannot put the same old grimy furniture back in the space that you just spent so much money into getting spruced up. But, scope creep meant rolling up my sleeves and reupholstering furniture myself.

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When I bought the glider set not long after we bought the house twenty years ago, I reupholstered it myself, how hard could it be to do it again? Well, for starters, I decided to reconsider exactly how it was upholstered. It’s far easier to DIY upholstery when you can take apart the existing condition and use it as a pattern than it is to reinvent the wheel. Or cushions as it were. Also, it would seem that when you are a childless couple in your twenties with no dog, you have more time to do things like reupholster furniture on weekends than when you are a dual career couple in your late forties with a dog and a teenager who is a senior in high school in the midst of the whole college application thing.

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Which is how I found myself taking a day off work to get a leg up on this whole reupholstering thing. I’d already spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon up at Fabrics Unlimited, where I’d dragged in one of the original cushions, some of the fabric I wanted to use as well as measurements and photos on my phone of what I had to work with. Everyone working there that day helped me sort out how to approach what it was I wanted to do, helping me select and cut all the materials I needed, including fabric to coordinate with what I had on hand that I wanted to use AND new foam for the cushions. I may have walked out of there convinced I could reupholster all the furniture in my house myself. Of course, once I got home and started actually doing it, it was a different story. I may have spent the better part of the last few weeks wondering what I was thinking.

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Pat and Edie handled refreshing the frames with a good cleaning and some paint. The cushions themselves went from a box edge to a waterfall edge, somewhat easier to execute while also being a slightly less formal look, perfect for a porch. The blue floral fabric is a vintage Waverly print that (I believe) came from Pat’s Grandma Kilgo’s fabric stash. I knew I didn’t have enough of it to recover the entire glider set and to make it work for all the back cushions, I had to include the selvages, so if you look closely at the back cushions, you might notice that edge.

The cushions still need a bit of a tweaking, we’re still trying to figure out what the new furniture layout is going to be in there, BUT, slowly but surely, the sunroom is getting there.