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I found this sofa bed on my local Buy Nothing site… the post said “does anyone want this before it goes to the dump?” Well, silly me… I do, it is classic Ranch Oak and it didn’t look too bad in the picture, just glue on that leg… clean it up and recover it. Not that I know anything about upholster. How hard could it be?

The leg was the least of my worries. Once I figured out how to get the back to fold down, I thought I would take a look at what was under the fabric. Besides this cotton batting stuff there was about a pound of actual dirt, like fine supper tiny little dirt, kind of like what you would find under a rug or something. Being that it and I live in the desert and it was probably made sometime in the 50s that is a lot of years of fine dusty dirt.

Seems the burlap backing keeping the springs in place has become dust as well and sadly most of the springs are broken, but there are two layers of springs so maybe with some foam or something I can still make this work.

After removing the full top layer of springs on both the seat and back and lall the burlap along with some serious dusting using both the air compreser to blow out the dust and the vacuum to suck up what was left it is looking pretty good… I got that leg glued back on too.

The bottom frame needed some additional support and glueing.

Here we are back up top. I have covered all the spring areas with burlap.

Now on to the foam. Since I removed a full layer of springs I needed to replace that with something…. so this upholstery foam will do the trick and probably be way more comfortable then the springs ever were.

Now on to Dacron… I covered all the foam with this Dacron batting. I used this to not only blend in any odd edges but from what I have read it is also suppose to make your fabric last longer.

Now it is time to figure out how exactly to fit the fabric. I could not use the old cover as a pattern because I changed way too much of the seat and back for it to fit anymore.

YIKES!!! Snake break… this little guy somehow got into the garage, he looks much bigger in the photo than he was in real life. It took a while to get him to go back out the side door. He decided to go under the threshold first and had to be coaxed out of there.

More fitting and adjusting. I decided to sew the back so it slipped on kind of like a slipcover.

It fits well and I am super proud of myself by this time.

Everything fits nicely when open. 🙂

A little hidden treasure underneath. I washed the old fabric and had enough from the old back to make this ‘dust cover” under the bottom of the seat part. This sofa is cool because you can store things in the little area underneath.

Totally done and just enough leftover old fabric to give a nod to the original “historic’ fabric. This project was very challenging but really cool once it was all done.