So you probably remember my post about painting my loveseat and I mentioned how my plan was to reupholster the bigger couch. Well, I sort of halfway did that. While I was trying to decide what kind of fabric to cover it with, we were storing it in the bedroom because we didn't have any other space for it. I started to think about how even after I did that project, where would I put the finished piece? The apartment could really only comfortably have one six foot couch in it and I didn't feel like getting rid of the couch I so painstakingly recovered a few months ago. That's when this new idea popped in my head. This whole time we've been in this apartment I knew I wanted to make myself a tufted headboard and after having the couch in our bedroom lined up perfectly with our bed for a while it finally clicked in my head to covert the couch into a headboard. Here's a photo of the couches I found at Goodwill. The one on the right is the one I used for this project. I hated that fabric, so it had to go.
I slowly started taking the fabric off the couch, with help from my cat Gremlin.
I only really bothered to remove the fabric on the backrest and arms of the couch. Why bother removing the fabric from the bottom when it was just going to end up in the dumpster? I also saved the buttons to reuse them for this project.
After exposing the wood, I roughly marked where I wanted to cut the couch.
Action shot with my new favorite tool, a Japanese style pull saw.
Here's the couch, now officially in two pieces. I ended up salvaging the three front legs, some of the foam and some straight pieces of wood from the bottom part of the couch. You never know when you'll need random scrap pieces of wood.
Here are the buttons I salvaged. I just painted them with two coats of acrylic gold paint.
I used some of the extra foam from the other side of the couch to fill in some of the spaces and to cover the exposed wood.
The fabric I used ended up being some fabric I got at a thrift store market thing down the road from me. I forget the exact price I paid for it, but it was obscenely cheap. Like about $5 for a bolt that had a little more than 8 yards of upholstery fabric on it kind of cheap.
My first tufting project. It started off kind of difficult, but I got the hang of it after a while.
Done with the tufting and the fabric is all stapled down. Now it's time for the side pieces.
I used the old fabric side pieces to create a pattern, but since halfway down the sides there would normally be arms of the couch, there was no more of the old fabric to make a pattern from so I had to do some drapery work to figure out how exactly to cover the rest of the sides. I also recovered the old piping from the side pieces with the fabric I was using. Conveniently for me, whoever made the couch used way more piping than they needed originally for the side pieces and it actually ended up being the perfect amount of piping for the new size of the sides.
And here it is finished in my messy living room!
Here it is in the room! Now I definitely need to buy some new sheets. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out and even though this isn't technically a tutorial post, I hope it was educational for you guys! :)