sofa surgery!
The Klippan, the cheapest sofa Ikea makes, is regarded as a starter or disposable piece of furniture by many. It's not large or cushy, not even long enough for me to lie down on and stretch my legs all the way out, and doesn't have separate seat and back cushions. But we've had it for probably 12 years and we haven't found another, more expensive sofa that satisfies our requirements of being
(Slim midcentury style sofas are not usually too deep, but tend not to have big enough arms; there's at least 2 styles from Ikea that have removable cushions and teacup-holding arms but are too deep.)
Our Klippan, under the removable cover, is made out of particleboard and wood-framed boxes covered in padding and unbleached muslin, and the seat is a thick single piece of foam suspended on springs. The single piece of foam thing is not great. When one has removable cushions one can rotate them, flip them, fluff them, and even pick them open and re-stuff them. Our sofa cushion developed depressions over the years on each side, and when a solid block of foam does that, you can't do anything to it except get a new block of solid foam.
The seat cushion was really untenably awful after all those years, but it seemed incredibly wasteful to throw away the sofa and buy a new one that was identical when the foam was the only thing wrong with it. I tried buying a huge lump of foam from a place that sells them, but when we got there we found out they were all too short. (Once I actually disassembled the sofa to fix it, I found out the original foam had also been beveled into a cushion shape on all the edges.)
Buying a new foam top mattress recently - (the old one also had dips in it - funny, that!) - gave me the opportunity to attempt to fix it.
My sofa surgery procedure was essentially... ( Read more... )
- comparatively shallow in the seat, so we can easily lean forward and sit up straight if necessary,
- not too big to fit in the center of the livingroom facing our desktop computers, and
- equipped with wide, flat-topped arms that can be used to rest mugs of tea.
(Slim midcentury style sofas are not usually too deep, but tend not to have big enough arms; there's at least 2 styles from Ikea that have removable cushions and teacup-holding arms but are too deep.)
Our Klippan, under the removable cover, is made out of particleboard and wood-framed boxes covered in padding and unbleached muslin, and the seat is a thick single piece of foam suspended on springs. The single piece of foam thing is not great. When one has removable cushions one can rotate them, flip them, fluff them, and even pick them open and re-stuff them. Our sofa cushion developed depressions over the years on each side, and when a solid block of foam does that, you can't do anything to it except get a new block of solid foam.
The seat cushion was really untenably awful after all those years, but it seemed incredibly wasteful to throw away the sofa and buy a new one that was identical when the foam was the only thing wrong with it. I tried buying a huge lump of foam from a place that sells them, but when we got there we found out they were all too short. (Once I actually disassembled the sofa to fix it, I found out the original foam had also been beveled into a cushion shape on all the edges.)
Buying a new foam top mattress recently - (the old one also had dips in it - funny, that!) - gave me the opportunity to attempt to fix it.
My sofa surgery procedure was essentially... ( Read more... )