About seven years ago, I would wake up every morning with an aching back. I knew the problem was the mattress, but new mattresses are expensive and at the time I had no budget for any kind of mattresses.
Soon after I began thinking how much I wanted new mattresses, I was walking somewhere with my kids. As I walked up the hill, I absentmindedly noticed that someone had put two twin mattresses to the side of the street for giveaway and glanced at them.
I stopped in my tracks in disbelief. They were name brand mattresses in pristine condition, clearly swapped out by someone replacing them for a new set. I called a taxi company, asked them to send me a taxi with a roof rack, and took the mattresses home.
When my neighbor saw us unloading them, he admiringly asked where we got them. He was shocked they weren’t new.
The first night I slept on one my back stopped hurting. G-d sent me just what I needed, when I needed it! I felt so grateful and blessed.
The mattresses were a meter wide, wider than our bedframes. I looked for used bedroom sets for a while, but 1 meter wide isn’t a standard Israeli bed size. Finally, it became apparent I wasn’t going to find used bedroom sets with the features I wanted that would fit our mattresses.
I kept an eye on the furniture stores and when there was a sale on beds, went to a store where I was able to customize the bed size, the headboard design and the bottom of the bed design so it included a built in storage area underneath.
I rarely buy new furniture and when these beds arrived, it was such a prosperous feeling. They were beautiful, they fit the mattresses perfectly, and they were exactly what I wanted. I was so happy with them.
But over time, I was dismayed to see the synthetic leather headboards and baseboards began to peel. I hadn’t had any previous experience with this material, but supposedly it was long lasting. It wasn’t.
At first the peeling was very minor and hardly noticeable, but it got worse over time. Eventually, my beautiful beds looked shabby and beat up. I thought of buying new beds, but the mattresses are still in great condition, the beds are exactly what I want, and I really didn’t want to make the effort of buying new beds and having to sell our current beds. It was a lot of work I didn’t want to do.
I felt a little stuck. I didn’t want to have beaten up furniture, but if I wasn’t going to buy new ones, something had to be done to make these look good. That meant reupholstering them, and the cost for professional upholstering would be formidable – not to mention needing to transport the furniture to the reupholsterer was more work I didn’t want to do.
After thinking about my dilemma for quite a while, I decided to try reupholstering the beds myself. I figured that the worst thing that could happen was I would take them apart and do a bad job. Since I was already at the point of considering buying other beds, I wouldn’t have lost much if they didn’t turn out well and could move on to buying something new if I had to.
I watched a few YouTube videos to get a sense of what was involved, and then I began.
Here’s a picture of the first headboard before I started.
I headed to the store and bought six meters of inexpensive black velvety material. Since it was going to be used on furniture that got minimal wear and I didn’t know what I was doing, spending on high quality fabric didn’t seem warranted.
I took the headboard apart, and I learned that a headboard is basically just a piece of wood with smaller pieces of wood covered with foam and then fabric, all screwed together.
Although when I ordered the beds the headboards were what I wanted, styles have changed and now I preferred a design running vertically rather than horizontally. I was pleasasantly surprised that rebuilding the headboard was easier than I expected.
Here’s what the headboards look like now.
Finishing the headboards was so gratifying.
Then I moved on to the fabric frames of the bottom section of the bed. That was a little more challenging since I needed to maneuver into awkward spots inside the underbed storage area. But they also turned out beautifully.
For 175 shekels of fabric and several mornings of my time, I was able to give new life to my bedroom set. I’m very happy with how they look!
How do you think they turned out? Is this the kind of project you would do?
Avivah
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