IT’S CHEAPER TO BUY NEW THEN TO RE-UPHOLSTER

IT’S CHEAPER TO BUY NEW THEN TO RE-UPHOLSTER

There I said it! Maybe we upholsterers should all go and do something else…

Although maybe the title should have said it’s cheaper to buy poor quality furniture than to recover.

Below are a couple of before and after photos taken of a recent job we did for a customer who bought a new sofa from a well-known furniture retailer because she liked the sofa but not the fabric and since it cost less than $1000 to buy she had it recovered in a fabric of her choice.

The photo of the poorly upholstered beige/brown sofa is the before shot!

 

 
 We sometimes recover furniture we are told by customers cost more than what they paid for it new and the reason they have it covered anyway is because they like the style or size or comfort which they haven’t been able to find again.

Some of this furniture is still ok and just needs some minor repairs and/or new cushion foam, but sometimes you get furniture that needs a lot of repair work and shows why it was very cheap in the first place as the manufacturer in China used the poorest quality materials available to make the furniture, from poor quality pine to poor quality webbing and foam (see below).

Generally besides the quality of the webbing they have also not used the correct number of strips (see below).

When we come across this we repair all the rails and joins in the frame, re-web the seat, and replace any foam that needs replacing using premium Dunlop Enduro foam.

The furniture is now far better than it were when bought new and will last for years and would be able to be recovered again in the future without any problems, as is the case with all quality furniture.

If a quality fabric is chosen it will last for years!

Cheap fabrics used by a lot of manufacturers won’t last very long at all and will pill or wear through very quickly and unfortunately combined with a poor quality frame and padding means that every year thousands of tons of this rubbish ends up in land-fill

 

 

Retailers also use a lot of misleading language in their description of furniture; an example of this is a very common one where P leather or PU leather is used to describe vinyl, making it sound like a higher quality product than it is.

There are very high quality commercial grade vinyl’s available that feel and look very “leather-like” but due to the cost of these you won’t find these used to cover any furniture you’ll find in your average furniture store.

This is also the case when terms like “Bonded Leather” or “By-Cast Leather” are used to describe a very poor quality product that will peel (de-laminate) after around 2 to 3 years of use (see below). This should never be sold as leather as it has absolutely nothing to do with genuine leather. Genuine leather will NEVER peel! Quality vinyl will NEVER peel!

 

 

Below are a few before and after photos to help us all feel better after what we've just seen.

 

 

 

This fabric was supplied to us by the customer and unfortunately there was not enough to also match the bottom of the front border with the top half, there was no more of it available.
Considering the state this furniture was in prior to the re-upholstery work it wasn't a disappointment for her.

 

 

                                                                 Custom made stool