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Is it worth Re-Covering or Re-upholstering my furniture? If your furniture was made by one of the ‘Famous Name’ makes such as Parker Knoll, Cintique, Ercol, G-Plan, Minty, M&S, Tetrad, Collins & Hayes or Laura Ashley then almost certainly, Yes. There are of course many other smaller volume makers of high quality furniture and you will know from the price you paid, and where it came from, that it is of good quality. And ‘good quality’ means more today than ever. In the last few years furniture manufacturing in the UK has virtually collapsed and much of what is on the market is mass produced in vast factories in the Far East and Eastern Europe. It is design-lead and generally not built to last. Your good quality furniture will generally be made from Hard Wood which is increasingly rare – may have good quality polished show wood (which is even rarer!) and will be jointed with dowels rather than just glued and stapled. As an overall test of quality, weight is a fair guide – if the furniture is heavy then it’s probably made from hard wood, while very light furniture may well be cheaply made. But a better guide is the condition it’s in. If at 10 years old the joints were pretty good and it was still comfortable – then its good quality, worth re-covering, and very likely to last a lot longer than a lot of mid-market furniture on sale today. To gauge whether a particular piece is suitable for covers or re-upholstery we use the ‘knee test’. Put one knee on the seat and grab the back with both hands and gently try to twist it side to side. If the back moves a lot and the joints are loose, then it’s probably not worth putting covers on it, it is better to re-upholster as we will be knocking the frame apart and re-setting joints. One last consideration – and one of the most common reasons for having Covers or Re-Upholstery of course, is that it fits your room just right, or you just like it! | |||||
2. What service is on offer and why is it important to know? We often talk about ‘re-covering’ furniture to mean a nice new look for the furniture in a new fabric. But there are a number of ways of achieving this, each being suitable for different kinds or conditions of furniture and at different prices. The main options are: • Loose Covers • Tailored Covers • Stretch Covers • Re-Upholstery • Re-Cover. The reason it's important to know what you are getting is that there are important issues of safety, cost and durability. Unfortunately by being ‘economical with the truth’ an unscrupulous supplier can charge a lot of money for a sub-standard job. As you only see the outer covering of the finished job, you may be none the wiser until something goes wrong. Briefly the options mean: Loose Covers The traditional loosely fitting cover, used to be made in a cotton print with a valance finish at the bottom – (the kind of covers the Queen had on her furniture when you watch the Christmas message). They are very clearly a Cover, and all look pretty much the same whatever the design of the furniture underneath. They are made to be easily taken off, washed and slipped back on. Tailored Covers Which are like Cintique furniture, which are seats and backs consisting of complex cushions attached with studs to the frame. The Covers exactly match the original cushions, including back flap and studs, and even the buttoning on the back. With modern Tailored Covers you can expect a Cover which is closely Tailored to the contours of your furniture and which as far as possible in a Cover, will reflect the main design features of the chair or sofa underneath. Stretch Covers These are Covers made principally from knitted polyester. They may have other yarns woven in such as cotton so that the supplier can say ‘cotton’ but the structure of the cloth is the same. They used to be made in a set of standard sizes and would stretch enormously to cover a chair etc but the stretch would mean seams appeared all over the place. Not something we do or recommend. Re-Upholstery This is the full stripping down of your furniture to the springs and frame, and building up with new or re-constituted fillings. When complete, the Re-Upholstered furniture should be as good as the original. We can also re-polish show-wood surfaces as part of the service. We find with most furniture that years in centrally heated homes means the joints deteriorate and that they often need knocking apart and re-setting, this also part of the service being offered. The most important issue however is the word ‘upholstery’. This actually means the fillings, and the way it is fabricated in the chair or sofa to give comfort and support (it doesn’t mean just the covering). Unfortunately either by mistake of design ‘re-cover’ (see below) is often confused with ‘re-upholstery’. There are enormous cost and quality differences between the two. It can take a man at least a day to strip down a traditionally upholstered chair, re-web it, sew in springs, then apply layers of felt etc and stitch in hair and fibre with proper firm stitched edges. You can expect such a re-upholstered chair then to last for many years – in fact many 10’s of years! Contrast this with Re-Covering, where the cover is simply removed and another cover sewn up and attached in its place. This is probably the most common misrepresentation in the industry, Re-Cover This is the removing of the original fabric Cover and replacement with a new one. A layer of fibre (commonly called ‘dacron’) may be added first to smooth out creases. It is particularly suitable when you have furniture in good condition – maybe only a few years old and you have become tired of, or need to replace the Cover, but don't want a Tailored Cover. We would not recommend re-covering anything more than about 7 years old, as the fillings underneath are probably beginning to deteriorate and before long your nice new cover (which is unlikely to have been cheap!) will start to sag and bag. As mentioned above it is important not to confuse re-cover with re-upholster. | |||||
| James Erskine Church Hill Place Edinburgh Scotland EH10 4BD Tel:044 01314473135 Fax:044 01314470408 Email:norman.laidlaw@james-erskine.co.uk Copyright © James Erskine 2012 | |||||
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