Tag Archives: leather

I know the trend in blogland is slip-covered, fabric furniture, but, leather kind of rules the roost at my house.

It’s hard to deny the practicality of leather furniture with children and pets.  In addition, my husband totally and completely loves leather.  It will always be a staple at our house.

We bought high-quality furniture leather but after 11 years of solid use, it was wearing out.  So, last year when it came time to buy something new we had to decide what was going to stay and what was going to go.
 I was very tired of wall-to-wall leather and was begging for some fabric furniture!

I bought three new, fabric chairs and I absolutely love them!

But, we didn’t buy a new leather couch.  If you look closely, you’ll notice our couch only looks new.

Here’s what it used to look like:

Here it is now:

This “after” picture was taken today…almost an entire year after getting the couch refurbished.  It still looks great!

You’ll notice in the “before” picture that the pillows were sagging, the leather was dry and worn and the couch had a few stains on the seat cushions.  Oh, and there was also a tear on one of the arms.

There was a dark spot where my husband tried to do some of his own repairs — it didn’t look so good!

But, it was an expensive couch and the cost to replace it was going to eat up a large part of my furniture budget.  Was there any way we could save it?

I had seen ads boasting the ability to repair leather furniture, but when I made a few calls to some of these vendors, they weren’t sure they could repair the tear.

Then, I called a local and reputable leather furniture store and asked them if they knew if the couch could be fixed up.  They gave me the name of a guy who does all their repair work.

When he came to our house, he reminded my husband of this guy:

 

Remember this scene from “Toy Story” when Woody gets all fixed up?

The furniture guy came to our house with his suitcases and bags and he cleaned, sprayed, fluffed and sewed until our couch looked like brand new!

Even the tear was gone!  There is just a little “scar” now where the tear was.  You have to know it was there to notice it.

We are so happy with how our couch turned out!

You’re probably wondering how much it cost to have our couch all fixed up.  First, I should tell you that the couch cost around $2100 dollars brand new when we bought it 11 years ago.  When we looked at brand new leather couches we would easily pay $2500-3500 for similar quality.

So, that said, we paid a little less than $800 to get it completely refurbished.  However, we did have the option to pay less if we decided not to do everything that could be done.  We opted to go for the full renovation because we decided that we would keep it for at least another 5 years.  He told us that with our level of wear-and-tear and the grade of our leather that we could expect to get at least another five to 10 years of life out of it.

Here’s what he did:

• Thoroughly cleaned the leather
• Repaired the tear
• Added new filling to the back cushions
• Added new cushions and filler to the seat cushions
• Refinished the leather and added new color to give it a brand new appearance