Repurposing an Ottoman

Anyone with a pet knows that often times you have to make some tough decisions…either your furniture or your pet.  We chose to keep our dog Charlotte but that meant going through countless pieces of furniture that her little dog claws tore to pieces.  It took us a while but we finally figured out that any furniture with looped fabric would quickly become torn after being subjected to puppy feet.

At some point you invest too much money to keep throwing furniture away,  and we reached that point.  So,  after nearly a year of having stuffing tracked around the house after Charlotte slept on our ottomans, we decided it was high time we recovered them.  The process of covering the ottomans had several iterations.  First I tried to sew a cover for one,  but my sewing machine kept snagging, and being of little patience I just gave up.  Plus the fabric I chose was an off-white.  Not sure what I was thinking on that one.  So,  there they sat for another 6 months until the urge to cover hit me again.

This time I decided that sewing wasn’t in the mix for me and decided that a staple gun was a better option.  We picked out fabric online and several days later the box was at our door,  and we were ready to go!

Once we took the tops off we stuffed the holes with padding.

We chose the kind that was cut primarily because it was cheaper and really just Charlotte was going to use the ottomans,  so it really didn’t matter.  If you’re planning on having your ottoman be used for humans you might want to go the solid route.

We also put batting over the entire top and stapled it the the underside so that it would look less puckered after we covered it with fabric.

Then we covered the tops with fabric.  The fabric was stapled to the inside cover of the top.  We had a bit of a problem with our staples not going all the way into the cover,  but after  a few times we got the hang of it.

Next we covered the bottom of each using the same stapling strategy.  We weren’t quite sure how to make it all work together on the sides,  so we ended up just folding one of the pieces of fabric over to create a clean edge.  I’m not sure if that’s technically the correct way to do it, but it worked well enough for us, and quite frankly I’m not all that much for looking at directions.  It took us a couple of hours to complete the project.  It might have gone faster however, had we known what we were doing!

All in all I’m happy with the way they came out.   Charlotte and her cat sister Norma seem to agree.

All in all I’m calling it a success!

Have you ever recovered anything?  Do you have any tips for our next reupholstering project?