Everyone here loves Craigslist, of course, but I've recently been amazed at how Craigslist and a good upholstery repair shop can work together in perfect harmony.
My SO bought a dark brown leather modern loveseat from Craigslist (for some ridiculously low amount like $75.) It was well made and EXTREMELY heavy. The only downside, and the reason it was so cheap, was that the seat cushion which is about 4 feet wide had a giant rip right in the middle of it. The previous owners had made some attempts to patch it which looked like crap, and the rip had reopened anyway. For awhile we put a blanket over it and ignored it, the only hassle being that the leather is slippery so the blanket would slide around and get bunched up.
Then I was checking my junk email for something else and saw that Angie's list had a local upholstery shop offering $200 repair for the price of $99. I bought it thinking that getting the cushion repaired would be a nice gift for my SO. I figured they probably couldn't match the leather, but maybe they could recover the cushion in a nice fabric?
And then I thought I might as well bring along the dining room chair seat cushions because they are trashed, too; those chairs were inherited and the previous fabric was the selection of an elderly female relative (white and silver silk with pink flowers), so not exactly our style, and they were riddled with 50+ years of stains and getting threadbare. The chairs themselves are nice hand-carved wood, but the removable cushions had been making them kind of an eyesore (that we still happily sat upon.)
Get to the upholstery shop, which is in warehouse space, and the guy finds the EXACT leather in his book in about 2 min of looking. He decides he can just replace the top part and leave the original sides which are in good shape like the rest of the sofa. He quotes $75 plus the price of the leather (which ended up being $45). So then I say I have bought the $200 worth of repair (for $99) and show him the printout, so he asks what else I have he can repair since the first job was lower than that - good thing I had the seat cushions with me! I had had those quoted before, but this guy quoted $10 less per cushion. I picked a heavy duty but traditional looking neutral fabric for those and left pretty happy but unsure how it would turn out.
To make a long story short, the work is done now and it is PERFECT! He even matched the style of the seam stitching on the leather. Now the sofa looks brand new and the chairs look 1000x better.
I would never have thought something like this would make me happy, but it does. :-)
