cimorene

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

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...

Removed the removable cover and flipped the sofa up on its front so the bottom of the seat cushion was vertical and I could reach the frame.

Removed all the staples holding the muslin that was stretched over the seat cushion at the back seam and then along the sides, leaving it attached at the front edge. (They're large staples, so this required using a little flat-head screwdriver as a chisel, wedging it under each staple with a few taps of a hammer, and then wrenching the staple out with needle-nose pliers.)

Put the sofa back right-side up and folded back the muslin and the thin layer of batting under it to expose the foam, then pulled the huge block of foam out.

Put the old foam top mattress (removed from its cover, so it was just a huge block of foam) down flat on the floor, lined the sofa cushion up to an edge or corner and traced around it with sharpie.

Used a boxcutter with the blade extended all the way out to cut out three roughly-the-length-&-width-of-the-sofa-cushion slices of the mattress (using sawing motions), because I determined that it was less than half the height of the sofa seat foam. (Since I didn't have a tablesaw or jigsaw or anything to make the measurements and cuts exact, I opted to add a few cm border on the sides I was cutting and then sort of lop off the extra bits after trying it on.)

I stacked the three slices of mattress foam on top of each other, wedged them into the sofa in place of the seat foam, and tested stretching the muslin back in place. I discovered that the height was okay - a little higher than the old cushion but nothing noticeable - but that the sharp/square edges were too noticeable.

So I sawed another couple of cm off the back edge (the cut long edges, that is) of the three mattress slices to make them sit further back from the front edge, then carved the sharp front and side corners of the top slice down to... vaguely approximate a bevel, although the result was very choppy and uneven.

Took a bag of polyfill which, luckily, was actually halfway to a fat roll of batting already, which made it easier to spread it out in an even layer over the entire top of the seat and down over the front edge. When the batting and muslin was stretched back in place, the unevenness was no longer apparent at all.

Because the new seat ended up slightly taller than the old one, re-stapling the muslin was a 2-person job. One of us had to pull the edge of it down over the wooden frame and the other had to come in with the staplegun. My staplegun is an ordinary cheap craft staple gun so the staples are not huge and long like the ones the sofa came with; we used more of them for that reason, but it has held up fine so far. (I may need to revisit that in the future, after buying a nicer staplegun.)

I'm extremely proud of this effort and feel almost as accomplished as my mom, who is disgustingly competent at fixing plumbing and carpentry and modifying furniture and painting murals and sewing and baking and sculpting and gardening and making things and changing tires and remodeling houses and all that kind of stuff.