Wayfair DIY Challenge: Project Tufted Bench

A while back a Wayfair representative contacted me to see if I would be interested in participating in a DIY project challenge.  Wayfair is a great on-line source for the home, hence the tagline, "a zillion things home".  I got to choose between three items and thought we would get the most use out of the coffee table.  I knew that it would either be used by the back door as a boot bench or as an ottoman in our playroom.

Just to give you an idea of what the table actually looks like, here is the image provided by Wayfair.  As you can see it has nifty little storage bins - great for storing things like gloves, hats, & shoes.

GiftCards.com provided a $50 giftcard to use for the project.  Once the giftcard arrived, I went to work on the challenge. 

My goal for the piece was to paint it and add tufting.  Once I determined the placement of the holes for the tufting I lightly sanded the surfaces and began painting.  Because the table is laminate, I used my favorite primer Zinsser.  The final color is one of my favorite grays, Urbane Bronze by Sherwin Williams.  I painted all the pieces before assembling which I believe made the project a little easier to manage. 

Some of the other items I used were a long needle (This was the closest thing I could find to an upholstery needle - not good.), fabric covered buttons (I returned these for larger 1" because you can only cram so much fabric into the 5/8" buttons), and nylon thread for buttons.

The tufted portion of the bench is made of a 3" thick piece of foam wrapped in quilt batting.  The layers go like this:  table top, 3" foam, quilt batting, fabric.  This is a job for more than one person.  So fortunately I had extra hands to help hold things in place.  Using a very long needle, I came up through the drilled holes in the bottom of the table, through all the layers and threaded a fabric covered button.  Then went back down through the layers.  I did this what seemed like 100 times  for each whole.  I didn't tighten all of the strings until all of the buttons were secured this way.  Then I flipped the piece over and tightened and knotted the strings to pull the tufting tight. 

Here is the final result. 

If you would like to check out more of the DIY projects, Wayfair has started a pinboard to showcase them all.