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Repairing an old sofa

The seat of this sofa was broken. Plus, the fabric was old-fashionated and dirty because of dust. I changed everything, keeping only the wood and the backrest mechanism.



The Initial Piece

Global overview

Backrest Mechanism

The bar goes into the hole. Under, there is another metal piece that blocks the metal bar.

The bar is screwed to the backrest structure.

And the backrest is screwed to the main structure.

Fabric Attaches

There are visible nail that fix the decorative fabric on the wooden structure.

You can see how the pattern of the fabric is adgenced. The main pattern is in the longuest direction.

Bottom

A black fabric has been attached AFTER the greenish fabric. This one avoid dust to go out of the sofa.

And of course, you have a hole for the metalic bar.

Removing Everything

Removing the black cover

You end up with the treillis. Which is broken on the edge.

How it was fixed on the back side:

Removing all the nails

Be careful not to damage the visible wood pieces.

Uncover the sofa.

Now, the metalic piece is much more visible

You can do the backrest later.

Zoom on the wood and attach of the fabric

Opening the Backrest

Nails fix the middle round to the wood structure.

Detatch the bar.

Detach the backrest

Detatch the White Fabric.

This one separate the covering tissue from the horsehair.

The different layers will now appear.

Remove the horsehair.

You will end up with a hay layer trapped inside burlap. This one is also in a bad state.

Remove the Spring Layers

Springs are attached to the burlap layer, so it will not be possible to remove the burlap first.

Springs are no more attached.

Protect the floor, you will endup with a lot of dust and also nails.

Last nails to remove.

We are done !

And ended up with a large amount of nails.

Nails

Preparing the Bedspring (without spring)

Cut wood slate.

I took an old halfly broken bedspring to get wood slate.

Cut them to the correct dimension.

Prepare the hole to avoid breaking the slate when screwing.

One screw is enough.

Adding mattress

Find a large piece of moth.

Cut the edges to obtain something smoother. Not too much, the covering fabric would help.

Prepare also the edge. NB: I used 2 moth blocks. So I have a jointure.

Covering

With regular tissue.

As in the original work, there is one fabric which avoid to sit directly on the moth, but also, it is a hard fabric that allow to shape the moth. The velvet is somewhat elastic so it is not a good candidate for shaping the moth.

Put the fabric.

Attach it first on the top.

Then, progressively move to the front.

Do the corners.

Edges are difficult to do. Take your time.

Adding the Velvet layer

Cover it as you did for the white fabric, to the difference that you need to cover everything. (not just the mattress).

You need to add decorative nails. Here, we took lines of nails. So once every 5 nails, you need to put a real one. This helps to get very nice lines.

Put the sofa on its side.

The line start with a nail, so fix it. Then, prepare the location of the next nails.

Now, you have a nice line.

Backrest covering.

For this one, it was in a good state, so I did not removed the hay nor the springs. I just covered it directly.

Nail the closing piece of velvet fabric to cover the hole.

Sew back the metallic bar.

Recreate the holes. You need to stitch the fabric to avoid the hole to grow

Final result

Writtings on the back





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