Our Apartment Redecoration Project Part I: Living Room

I mentioned a few posts back how busy I was. Things have mostly settled down, our redecoration is complete, and now I have time to share pictures!

The redecoration project was rather unplanned. It all started because we were gifted two very nice couches. When Mr. Q suggested that we take the couches I will admit that I was dubious. Our purple Ikea couch has supported us well over the last few years and I didn’t know if the new ones would be that much nicer. But they are much nicer… higher quality foam stands up much better to use over time and deeper cushions are just more comfortable–there’s more space to tuck your legs up on the couch or surround yourself with blankets and pillows!

Our before and after pictures aren’t quite at the same angle, but you get the idea. The dining area didn’t change a whole lot, so I didn’t feel it needed to take up as much space in the picture. You can see that we’ve gained furniture and “stuff” over the last three or so years (and that before picture was very early on, but I thought we’d go for the most drama in terms of change).

Those white couches you see came to us with country-farm style red covers on them. It was the right sort of color but not at all the right style for our modern jewel tone living room. After lots of stressing about the potential of having to recover the new couches, I realized that the shape of them wasn’t much different than our ikea couch. And that led us to Ikea-hack covers for our new couches.

We bought 3 white cotton twill Ektorp couch covers (a 3 seater, a 2 seater, and one extra 3 seater for extra fabric), chopped them up as needed so they could expand to fit the new couches, then chopped up the extra fabric cover to fill in the gaps, and finally sewed all the unusual seams to create a new couch cover that would fit. It’s not a beginner level sewing project, but it’s certainly do-able if you have an idea of draping and are creative about problem solving how to expand a couch cover to fit a larger couch than it was intended for. I think this will all be easier to show in pictures.

It was a long Saturday of shopping at Ikea and sewing until late into the night. Mr. Q doesn’t have the sewing skills to help with that part but he was engaged the entire time in positive encouragement and occasionally seam ripping or other assigned jobs.  He also put all of the cushion covers on while I was madly seam ripping and taking large white bundles to my sewing table.

I didn’t take the time to nicely serge or finish the new seams. We actually had to wash the 2 seater cover one day after finishing it (oops! but at least the stain came right out along with the wrinkles!) and the seam allowances frayed as you would expect, but not enough to cause any alarm. So I’m not worried about it. There was also nice velcro on the old red cover that held the cover to the couch under the curve of the arms and also along the back seat area. We kept the velcro but didn’t get around to sewing it on. I think it would be nice under the arms, but I’m not inclined to do it anytime soon. The bit along the back doesn’t seem to have made a difference–our new cover stays in place without a problem.