How I Saved Hundreds on My Sofa

Recently my husband gave me the ultimatum that our sofa is not allowed to move with us for our upcoming move.  He had good reason; the sofa was ugly, cheap, uncomfortable, and had been shredded on all sides by my sweet kitty.  Unfortunately, that left us with the challenge of finding a new couch.

We had lots of competing interests when it came to the new sofa.  We wanted it to be high quality, attractive, and inexpensive.  Obviously, those qualities don't always go together.  I was especially reluctant to drop a lot of money on a sofa that my cat might claw.  We shopped around, trying to figure out what styles suited us and to get an idea of prices.

Then a few weeks ago a good friend happened to mention that she was interested in selling her sofa because she was preparing to move cross-country.  I knew this friend and this sofa well, and was excited that I could get such a high quality couch for her asking price of $100.  The only downside was that the sofa was plaid.  Not an offensive plaid at all, but not exactly the look we were going for, either.

We decided to go ahead and buy the sofa without any real plan for how we were going to deal with the plaid.  I looked into having it reupholstered, but discovered that it would be prohibitively expensive.  Then, I began searching the web for slipcovers and got really lucky.  Ikea has a slipcover for a sofa with almost the exact shape of the sofa that we had just purchased!  I took the measurements of our sofa and they were similar to the measurements of the slipcover, so I ordered it and waited with anticipation.

When the slipcover arrived I put the cushion covers on first, and they fit!  Next was the cover for the sofa itself.  We pulled and tugged but were not able to get the cover on.  The shape was just right, but the cover was about six inches too short.  It couldn't quite fit from one arm all the way down the sofa to the other arm.

At this point I was disheartened, but my husband saw a possibility.  He suggested that we cut the slipcover down the middle and add an insert of matching fabric to bridge the space.  I thought that he was crazy, but I gave him permission to give it a go.  He headed off to the fabric store (yes, my husband sews) and returned with a fabric almost identical to our slipcovers.

I went to dinner with a friend and returned to find a beautiful, slip-covered couch in my living room!  Somehow he pulled it off!  You can definitely see the seams of the insert, but it looks like it has always been part of the slipcover.  The fabric blends in perfectly.

The Ikea Ektorp sofa bed slipcover.  The same slipcover that we used.

Instead of spending anywhere from $800-$1600 we were able to get a beautiful, high quality sofa for $150 ($100 for the couch + $63 for the slipcover + 12 for the extra fabric - $25 that we got for the old couch on Craigslist).  As a bonus, our sofa is now washable because it's slipcovered.

Obviously, we don't want our cat to claw this sofa too.  We have done a lot of research and are implementing some anti-scratching strategies.  However, even if he does claw this sofa I'll feel a lot better than if we had dropped $1000 on it!