Description

To save yourself some real money whendecorating your house, you can buy old, dated or worn furniture atyard sales and thrift stores and then refinish them yourself withsimple DIY skills. Creating a refreshed finish yourself is alsovery satisfying, and you can make your updated furniture to suityour personal taste and to fit in perfectly with your existing homedécor and color scheme.

On this page I have listed many inspiring and creative tutorialsfor repurposing various objects into new furniture pieces, as wellas for sanding down a surface and refinishing with varnish, woodstain or paint. Projects include makeovers for tables, chairs anddressers, plus there are step-by-step instructions for taking yourrevamping a stage further by adding upholstery; you can learn torestore damaged chairs or simply change the fabric to somethingmore modern.

Refinishing old and worn furniture by yourself can save a lot ofmoney compared to taking it to a professional; and if you enjoy DIYit can be a very fun and satisfying project too. If you areactively looking for new furniture, especially if you have justbought your first home and you're short of money, tatty furnitureyou find for low prices at auctions, antique fairs, car boot salesetc. can be made to look like new with some TLC. You can also buycheap new furniture and add your own unique twist onto it to makeit unique. Before you have had practice with refinishing furniturethough, it would be best to stay away from the antiques!

- Upholstery: You can either add new foam, batting and fabriclayers onto something like a sturdy coffee table in order totransform and re-purpose it into a stool, or (more often) you canre-upholster a piece of furniture to refresh and update it.Re-upholstering is a popular way to revamp old chairs, footstoolsand chaise longues that already have the padded seating. Tufting isa traditional style of upholstery where you thread through thefoam, batting and fabric layers at regular intervals to create apattern of depressions all over the upholstery.

- Re-purpose an object or piece of furniture: For instance, youcould turn old doors or windows into tables, upholster a wood crateto make a footstool, or add legs to a metal storage box to make aside table. Many larger wooden items, especially box shapes, can beturned into a useful products for the home.