Richard Felt: How to Make Over a Thrifted Iron Bench

Hi there, Remodelaholics! It’s Jessica from Mom 4 Real back with another fun DIY under $20! Today, I want to show you how I took a sad little iron bench and turned it into a beautiful french inspired iron bench! It took very little effort, and the difference is amazing!

This is what I started with…a velvet fabric covered iron bench that had seen better days. I had to look past the awful fabric to see its true potential. The bench is very sturdy and heavy…not something you see often these days…it just needed a little love and attention.

How to Make Over an Upholstered Iron Bench

I thought thought about trying to remove the fabric, but it was tacked down really well, so I just decided to improvise and cover the existing fabric…the legs needed a little love though. If you look really closely, you can see that each leg has a little painted detail on it in red and green. I love detail usually, but not this time…the red and green just didn’t work for me.

I decided to spray paint the legs in a matte black.

When spray painting, you really need to hold the spray paint at least 6 inches away from the piece you are painting and slowly move the can from side to side. Don’t oversaturate your piece with paint, or it will drip. Instead, take the time to paint a light coat and then go back once the first coat is dry and give it another coat. You will be much happier in the end!

Once the paint dried, I brought my bench in to cover it. I had some scrap fabric that I had used on some pillow covers for our living room, and decided to use it. I laid the bench upside down on the fabric and cut enough around the edges to cover the top and staple underneath the bench.

Now for the fun part…I folded the fabric over twice so the edges a clean, pulling my fabric tight. Then, I stapled my fabric to the bottom of the bench. I used a brad stapler from Ryobi, but you can certainly use a staple gun of any sort.