Re-upholstery
Is it worth upholstering?
The quickest and easiest way to get started is to send us a photograph or two of your furniture. Providing rough dimensions of your furniture helps us to work out the materials and fabric quantities required. We try our very best to respond within 2 business days with a preliminary estimate. You can upload your pictures and request an estimate here or the button below.
AFTER you have an idea of the budget required, feel free to give us a call and we would be happy to arrange an appointment for you in the showroom to further discuss details or select fabrics.
Timeline
2-4 Months
Details
Variable Pricing
Re-upholstery
One thing we want to help you with is the decision whether or not your project is feasible, which may not be a purely financial consideration. We want to ensure we provide you with realistic expectations of what is possible.
Production Furniture
A lot of furniture is no longer designed to be re-upholstered. Not only are all frame components cut with computer controlled equipment, so is all the foam and fabric. All manner of intricate shaping and cuts can take place in production (for aesthetic reasons as well as for cost saving) and that affects the way a piece of furniture is put together. This may translate into a piece being made with very many small cuts of fabric all seamed together – as layered pillows, or divisions where frames come together, etc. so that items can be packaged as “parts” and simply assembled on site.
In an upholstery shop – once covers are removed from a frame, the upholsterer must take apart all those pieces to make a pattern from. Whereas in an automated factory this process might have taken 5 minutes, in a small shop this may add up to 8 hours of layout and sewing time in order to get all the same pieces placed, pattern matched and cut out. Often, it is also impossible to recreate the types of fill that are used in production because that too is automated or custom poured foam. It may be impossible to achieve the same look and feel. And even if it is possible – the amount of time this all takes in comparison to very automated production facilities is night and day different. If you expect to reupholster a production piece for what you bought it for, or for that matter what you can replace it for – you’re probably out of luck. Sadly, most of it has been designed and built for a consumer culture and is a throw-away item.
Recliners
We typically don’t re-upholster recliners with fluffy, attached cushions. We rarely reupholster even average recliners. They too can be replaced for substantially less than the cost of re-upholstering.
If you have a custom piece or a very sentimental piece, that just happens to have a reclining mechanism, we would assess it on an individual basis, and would provide you with an estimate in advance.
Peeling Faux Leather
Production methods of synthetic leather and leather-like goods have created pieces that look and behave like leather when new but very quickly begin to delaminate or peel and crack with any age or sun exposure. Bonded leather is also not really leather. It is the equivalent of MDF in the wood world. It’s ground up leather – glued together into a “skin” and then a very thin surface of vinyl on top to approximate the leather texture. Its surface breaks down like most of the cheap production vinyls. It’s like MDF with a wood veneer.
To reupholster most of these piece may not be worth doing. Reupholstering with REAL leather – as in top-grain aniline dyed leathers, the cost of the leather alone for a project is often double what you may pay for a replacement of the same piece in leather-like contemporary furniture.
Furniture With Broken Frames
An important part of the reupholstering process is assessing the quality of the frame. If the frame is damaged, reupholstering may not be the best option.
We typically do not do house visits to assess furniture. We can, but we charge a fee which is deductible if you decide to proceed with the repair and upholstery. Most times, good pictures will give us what we need to assess the project.
Sometimes we don’t know there is damage until we take something apart. If it is minor and easily repaired, we don’t charge you extra for it. If however, it takes more time and materials than we have allowed for, we would consult with you in terms of options.