You can click here: http://www.mindspring.com/~billgoodman/b... to view three bench makeovers. Each project is basically the same, and I'll give you the steps for each.
Makeover Number 1:
The first pair of photos shows a child's old toybox that had been neglected and discarded.
The sides were made from pieces of paneling, so I just painted over those with leftover
white flat latex house paint, but you could use any kind of paint you had handy. I covered
the vinyl top and Mickey Mouse stickers with padding and fabric.
The padding I used was an old bedspread, but you could purchase batting as well. Any fabric will work, though, as long as it's soft and won't show through your top fabric. For that, I simply used a white bedsheet. Before I attached the sheet, I sewed a layer of my stuffing to it in a quilted pattern to give it more strength, since the sheet was fairly thin. You can omit that step if you use thicker fabric.
I used a staple gun to attach the sheet to the toybox top, folding the raw edges under carefully and securing it tightly over the stuffing. I covered the staples by hot-gluing a strip of green bias tape all the way around the edge of the fabric (on the underside of the lid), but it's not really necessary, just an option.
To decorate the top a bit, I stenciled green ivy around the edges with just a plain stencil that I repeated end to end until I made it all the way around. Then I attached four green buttons that helped accentuate the quilted look, but if you used a patterned fabric, you could eliminate these decorative steps.
With just a little time and effort (and almost no money), the discarded toybox became a comfortable, decorative bench and storage chest.
Makeover Number 2:
The second set of photos shows a pitiful table that anybody else would probably have
thrown away, but no, it had possibilities . . . .
The top was veneer that was peeling and revealing an even less attractive surface underneath, so covering the top again seemed to be the simple answer. The legs of the table were strong and attractive, so they would just get paint.
First, I removed that drawer pull that was only decorative anyway and filled the screw
