Refurbished Bench Project – DIY

For those that don’t know, my little sister, Savanna, is getting married October 2018 and moving off to the coast of Mississippi!

I’ve been planning her wedding shower, and I knew I wanted to give her something special as a gift that would really be useful in their new home.

I talked it over with my mom, and we decided that in addition to getting separate gifts we also wanted to buy them some type of seating for their entry way!

So we hit our local antique village and went in every. single. store.

I totally fell in love with this beauty! But we were NOT in love with the price. 😳

Once we realized basically everything we liked was between $250 – $400 we changed plans. The new goal was to find a piece and redo it ourselves!

Skylar spotted this bench shoved in a side aisle, and my mom ended up negotiating the price down to $100!

We also grabbed these 4 massive plantation shutters in a different shop for $45.

(These will be part of the deco for the shower and will appear in a future post!)

Once we got the bench back to my parents’ house we wiped it down and put down paper to work on top of.

The seat section was removable which made it easier to work on.

The first thing that we did was put a quick first coat of paint on it.

We used Annie Sloan Paint’s French Linen, and it works GREAT! You don’t have to sand or prime before you start, and it only takes 1-2 coats for most projects I’ve used it for!

Supposedly you can get Rustoleum chalk paint for about half the price and get similar results. Just throwing that out there.

While that was drying we ripped off the old cushions. The fabric was wrapped around foam and then stapled directly onto the seat.

It took quite a bit of careful pulling with pliers and scissors to get it all off where we could reuse the boards and foam!

(We actually purchased new foam to stuff the seats with, but it was WAY to thick even cut in half to be used! We decided to stick with the original pieces since they were in great shape.)

Before we started working on the new cushions we went ahead and put the final coat of paint on.

OF COURSE I forgot to take a picture of exactly how we got these cushions on.

Mom basically wrapped the foam with the new material and tucked the outside seams in to create a clean edge.

We pinned it in place with straight pins, lined everything up where we wanted it, and then used a staple gun to secure it down as close to the edge of the cushion as possible. This attached the entire cushion/square board down to a small lip of the larger board.

Next I ran a border around the edge to cover the staples and any visible gaps. We used hot glue to attach it. Here’s a close up of the final product!

We distressed the bench very minimally to match other pieces of furniture that Savanna has redone by rubbing sandpaper along some of the edges.

And that was it! We spent a total of about $150 and ended up with a similar piece of furniture to what I had originally seen!

Here’s a sneak peek of it being used for her wedding shower today!

Do you have any awesome pieces that you’ve found and refurbished? I’d love to see them! Drop a picture in the comments below!