Freshening up your furniture can breathe new life into your living spaces using refinishing, upholstery, and various decorative painting techniques. These methods not only enhance how your home looks but are also eco-friendly and add meaning to your home.

Conserving pieces that have age, patina, craftsmanship, and significant meaning in your life can be incredibly rewarding.

 

 

Benefits of Furniture Refinishing, Upholstery and Decorative Painting

Refinishing, upholstery and decorative painting are sometimes affordable routes to updating and refurbishing your old pieces, but not always. They are, however, beautifully conservative and give your home so much character.

Refurbishing old home furnishings not only refreshes your furniture but it also adds a personalization to your home. It’s eco-friendly. And quite frankly, the quality is almost always better in older furniture.

There is nothing like the beauty of old furnishings.

Choosing the Right Craftsmen and Workrooms for Refinishing, Upholstery and Decorative Paint

Choosing the right craftsmen and workrooms can make a huge difference in the outcome of your furniture.

For refinishing, upholstery, and decorative painting, look for professionals with a portfolio, good reviews and at least 15 years, if not 20 of experience in their field.

Tips for working with Craftsman and Workrooms

Communication is also important. Make sure the craftsman understands what you want and can provide a brief explanation of their process.

Expect a timeline. Some workrooms will take advantage of vague delivery dates.

Whether you choose an independent craftsman or a workroom, finding the right match will help ensure a smooth and satisfying furniture makeover experience.

Get a bid.

Never leave a piece of furniture without getting a receipt and taking photos of its current condition.

Be clear on who is picking up, who is delivering and what delivery fees are involved. 

Identify any structural problems that need attention. 

Choosing Fabrics

Always get fabric samples. Known as ‘memos’ in the design industry, these large fabric samples are important to help you visualize what your piece will look like recovered.

Most retail and online stores provide small fabric swatches whereas, ‘To the Trade’ (usually via an interior designer or architect) fabric companies provide large ones. These companies require you have an account with them before they’ll lend or give you fabric samples. 

Choosing Wood Finishes

Provide images or large sized paint chips so the craftsman has the ability to replicate it. The closer you can get to what you want prior to the actual work the better. In fact, make it a point to get exactly what you want. The extra foot work will give you a very happy outcome!

Lastly, be sure to get a finish sample of wood stain, antiquing or decorative paint! I can’t stress this enough. 

Freshening Up Your Furniture with Custom Upholstery, Slipcovers, Throw Pillows and Cushions

Freshening up your furniture with fabric treatments is a practical and really effective way to freshen up your home.

It not only offers flexibility in updating the look of your sofas and chairs with different fabrics and colors, but it really helps you dial in your design scheme and pull together the disparate pieces in your home that don’t seem to go with anything.

Slipcovers

Slipcovers are great because they are easy to remove and clean. While they might not be the cheapest option, slipcovers are a smart investment for protecting and prolonging the life of your furniture.

Upholstery

The structure and craftsmanship of older upholstered pieces like sofas and armchairs are often superior to modern, cheaper alternatives making them a great candidate for recovering.

By investing in custom upholstery, you can select high-quality fabrics, often better quality and better designed than what originally came on the piece. This process might be comparable to buying a new, cheaper sofa but the customization makes it worthwhile. And once you’ve recovered a piece with high quality fabric, it’s unlikely you’ll need to do it again for at least another 25 years. Maybe even longer.

Hard to believe, I know but I’ve seen it happen many times over the 25 years I’ve been doing design professionally.

Freshening Up Your Furniture with Custom Seat Cushions and Skirted Chair Cushions

Custom seat cushions are a great way to enhance both the comfort and look of your furniture. Whether you need new cushions for dining chairs, window seats, or outdoor furniture, custom options allow you to choose the perfect fabric, thickness, and style.

Skirted seat cushions can make a significant impact on the overall appearance of accent and ‘side’ chairs.

Custom Pillows

Custom throw pillows are one of the easiest ways to add personality to your home. With a variety of shapes, sizes, and fabrics to choose from, you can create a cohesive look that ties your decor together. Custom pillows can be designed to match your existing furniture or to stand out as statement pieces. They’re versatile and can be easily updated to keep your space looking fresh.

Personal Experience

I love all my custom fabric furniture treatments, and they’ve stayed stylish for nearly 20 years. The ability to personalize each piece has allowed me to maintain a cohesive and timeless look throughout my home. Investing in quality fabrics and expert craftsmanship has paid off in both aesthetics and durability. Each piece feels unique and reflects my personal style, and the longevity of these treatments has been truly impressive.

Choosing these options may require a higher initial investment, but the long-term benefits of quality and customization make them worth it. 

Freshening Up Your Furniture with Refinishing and Decorative Painting

Freshening up your furniture with refinishing and decorative painting is also a great way to pull mismatched pieces together in your home. Here are my favorites. I use them in my own home projects as well as my clients’ homes.

Refinishing

Refinishing involves stripping away the old finish and applying a new transparent stain, which shows the wood grain and revives the natural beauty of the piece. It’s labor intensive and can be a little costly. But what a great way to revive a beautiful old wood piece. 

Keep in mind moderately priced furniture nowadays is rarely solid wood. You have to go to a better quality furniture brand for solid woods which makes refinishing older furnishings a good investment.

Glazing

Glazing adds a translucent layer over paint or stain, that sits ‘on top’ of the old stain. It’s not fully transparent but does show a little grain. It creates depth and richness that enhances the furniture’s character and is an inexpensive version of refinishing.

Glazing is what took my old ‘golden oak’ dining room table to a deeper, more updated dark finish.

The downside is that it’s kind of weird to clean. You use a damp washcloth, not furniture polish. And you do need to keep it clean because food left on the finish too long can stain or mar it. 

I clean mine well after a messy meal. Otherwise, it simply gets dusted.

Antiquing

Antique painting gives furniture an aged, weathered look, adding charm and a sense of history to your decor. I’m not a big one for chalk paint. I’m kind of bored with it. But antiquing is really beautiful.

There are many other decorative painting techniques that freshen up the look of older furniture, but these are the ones that I love to use in my design projects and in my own homes.

They offer a stylish and meaningful way to update your furniture, making them a continuing part of your home for years to come.

SAVE MY SPOT!

 

 

Join me LIVE January 13th at 10:00 am Pacific to learn the 3 frameworks I’ve used for 25 years for family, friends and clients to style, arrange and plan their home makeovers with a small budget, using what they have. Grab your space here and learn all about the  Home Styling Use What You Have Makeover MasterClass

What is Wellness Design? Learn more about the connection between your wellbeing and your home, featured on Deirdre Fitzpatrick’s Dying to Ask Podcast. And if you’d like to dive deeper into this topic, check out my blog post, “Hiring an Interior Designer”.