DIY Furniture Designs

To save yourself some real money when decorating your house, you can buy old, dated or worn furniture at yard sales and thrift stores and then refinish them yourself with simple DIY skills. Creating a refreshed finish yourself is also very satisfying, and you can make your updated furniture to suit your personal taste and to fit in perfectly with your existing home décor and color scheme.

On this page I have listed many inspiring and creative tutorials for repurposing various objects into new furniture pieces, as well as for sanding down a surface and refinishing with varnish, wood stain or paint. Projects include makeovers for tables, chairs and dressers, plus there are step-by-step instructions for taking your revamping a stage further by adding upholstery; you can learn to restore damaged chairs or simply change the fabric to something more modern.

Refinishing old and worn furniture by yourself can save a lot of money compared to taking it to a professional; and if you enjoy DIY it can be a very fun and satisfying project too. If you are actively looking for new furniture, especially if you have just bought your first home and you're short of money, tatty furniture you find for low prices at auctions, antique fairs, car boot sales etc. can be made to look like new with some TLC. You can also buy cheap new furniture and add your own unique twist onto it to make it unique. Before you have had practice with refinishing furniture though, it would be best to stay away from the antiques!

- Upholstery: You can either add new foam, batting and fabric layers onto something like a sturdy coffee table in order to transform and re-purpose it into a stool, or (more often) you can re-upholster a piece of furniture to refresh and update it. Re-upholstering is a popular way to revamp old chairs, footstools and chaise longues that already have the padded seating. Tufting is a traditional style of upholstery where you thread through the foam, batting and fabric layers at regular intervals to create a pattern of depressions all over the upholstery.

- Re-purpose an object or piece of furniture: For instance, you could turn old doors or windows into tables, upholster a wood crate to make a footstool, or add legs to a metal storage box to make a side table. Many larger wooden items, especially box shapes, can be turned into a useful products for the home.