The $5 Footstool Makeover

Lately, I’ve been on a garage/estate sale kick. And when I say “kick” I mean I spend Wednesday and Thursday evenings scouring the internet for estate sales, making a “game plan” and a map with every location I will be hitting up on it. So, yeah, I’m a little intense sometimes.

Anyhoo, I have scored some amazing deals over the past few weeks and nothing gets me more excited than a good deal! My hubby, however, doesn’t really get it. And he freaks out a little when he sees me come home with something that looks like this:

That is one ugly footstool, no? Not loving the puke-green leather? Yeah, me either. But it was $5 and I knew that I could recover this baby lickity split and have a super-cute piece. I just had to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

Turns out, once I figured it all out, I had everything I needed to get started (don’t you love it when that happens?). I had that tool thingy that pulls out upholstery staples and I had a good amount of already bleached and washed dropcloth fabric. So I set to work yanking some 100 year old staples out of that fabulous green leather and found, to my surprise, that under the leather, the stool was stuffed with straw and wool. I’m thinking this is a pretty old stool…

Anyway, once I got the leather off (good riddance) I draped my dropcloth fabric over the top, checked all the sides to make sure I had adequate coverage, then cut a square of fabric. Flipping the stool over, I then pulled the fabric taut on four points and then began pulling taut and stapling around the circumference of the stool. I was too lazy to bust out my sewing machine so once I had the top of the stool covered, I tore (yes, tore) a length of the dropcloth (one of the long sides being already hemmed) and began making a pleated skirt, stapling around the circumference of the stool, very close to the edge. This is how it turned out:

And that was it. Super-easy and I think it looks great, if I do say so myself! It took me all of an hour and a half to finish this project (after I got the green leather off).

Oh, and did you notice this cute little side table? I found this little guy at an antique mall for $30. It was a hideous brown color with a picture of a duck in a basket on it. Who does that? A duck in a basket? Really? Anyway, I took it home (yet another piece Lobster looked at and said “Good God!”) and I spray painted it a semi-gloss white that I already had on hand. Nifty, eh? Ballard Designs sells this exact thing for $140. TAKE THAT, BALLARD!