Amount of material to recover all bunks and seatbacks?

[steve yates]

Anyone refurbished the bunks/settees ofa circa 30’ish foot boat and can remember roughly the amount of material they needed to recover all the foam. Thats v berth, two saloon berths, a quarter berth, and cushions for extending one saloon berth to a small double.
Seat backs on the two saloon berths..
If you can remember the sqm of material you ordered it would be useful to estimate the cost of doing ours.
Thanks.

 

[Tranona]

sqm is not a good measure. Upholstery is commonly 60" wide so you have to measure your cushions in length and width of material for all panels and then work out the best way of cutting from the width of the fabric you are using, making allowances for hems, piping and returns to attach the bottom fabric which is different from the faces. Some fabrics have repeating pattern like wallpaper which means you may lose some length to get patterns to match.

To give you an idea of cost my GH has 4 bunks, 2 of which are in 2 sections and one extra wide all using existing foam, plus 2 back rests, 4 end cushions and a padded headboard all with new foam in a mid price fabric cost £1700 to have made. I would guess material cost was about one third of that. Some photos, first 2 of my current GH and last one of my old Eventide taken 20 years after it was done to give you an idea of the end product. personally I think that unless you have experience of this sort of work this is not a good DIY project. Does not mean it cannot be done but to get the standard of finish that a professional will achieve requires a lot of skill and time.

 

[Concerto]

When I had new upholstry on my Fulmar, I bought IIRC 10 metres of fabric and I had plenty left. You should get away with 8 metres. I bought a remnant of chenile upholstry fabric from eBay at a fraction of main suppliers. chenille upholstery fabric for sale | eBay

 

[LittleSister]

Cushions? Chenille?

What happened to to the plucky British seafarer, pitting himself against elemental forces?

 

[Boater Sam]

I had 10 rolls to do mine. Buy 10 rolls, if you have some over, that's funny, so did I !

Can you not use a tape measure? No one on here knows how many cushions you have or how big they are. So how can they ever give you an accurate figure?

 

[davidmh]

To do a DIY job unless your are very experienced I would avoid putting piping on the edges.
If cost is important do not use a fabric with a pattern as you will waste a lot of material getting the pieces matched.
As Tranona said most fabric is 60 inches wide.
For a square sided bunk cushion or backrest measure the Maximum top finished length , maximum width finished , and the finished thickness. You will need a top, a bottom and 4 side pieces, allow 2 inches (50 mm) all round for seams on each piece.
Make a scaled drawing and layout the panels. on a 60 inch wide area.
for pillow type cushions you will need 2 pieces 1 top and 1 bottom, Measure edge to edge over the cushion curve in both the length and width direction, add 50mm all round on each piece for seams. Layout panel as above.
You will need to decide how you are going the fit and remove the covers, the easiest is to use velcro. Easiest edge for the velcro is usually the hidden longest side. Cut an extra sidepiece for the cushion, Sew one joint side pieces to the top piece and the other joint side piece to the bottom. You then have an overlap to sew the velco onto.
Use the existing foam as a pattern for any new foam it will be bigger than the finished cushion to give a tight finished product.
When I did mine I experimented with a simple backrest and used an old sheet as fabric to see it worked ok before cutting the new fabric.
David MH

 

[srm]

Visit your boat with a tape measure and note book.
Measure each cushion etc. you want to recover. (remember six or more sides depending on shape)
Decide on preferred fabric and confirm usable width.
Spend some time head scratching and sketching to work out the most economical way to fit the cushion pieces into the fabric roll.
Use this information to calculate the lenght you need to buy.
Add 10% to that length.
Calculate price, add shipping/collection costs.
Add costs of thread, needles, other materials.
Decide if you really need new covers.

Or do what my wife did:
Take boats cushions to local upholsterer and ask for a price. (Not in the UK so price probably less than material costs there).
Collect smart new cushions a few weeks later.

 

[LittleSister]

Use the existing foam as a pattern for any new foam it will be bigger than the finished cushion to give a tight finished product.

Or, to look at it the other way around -
Your covers need to be made slightly smaller than the measured length, depth, etc. of your existing or newly bought foam, otherwise they will not stretch tight and you will have creases and bagginess - the foam needs to be under slight compression once the covers are on. If I remember correctly, we were advised to reduce a 6 foot length by 1 inch (which would equal cover dimensions about 98.5% of measured foam dimensions, but I doubt the exact reduction is critical - err towards tighter rather than looser) and shorter lengths pro-rata, which seemed to work out well for us.

Getting the foam in the finished covers, and with the covers' edges and corners correctly aligned with the cushions, can be surprisingly challenging, depending on their shape, size, openings, and on the inner surface finish of the covers. I'd suggest airily handing this task to someone dogged who won't want to admit defeat by such an apparently simple task! ?

If there's a risk you'll have to do it yourself, or suffer 'consequences' from delegating it, I believe that covering the foam with an inner muslin cover before inserting in the new outer cover is the traditional approach that eases this task. Some foam suppliers will make such muslin covers to match the foam they cut for you. (No, I don't know why one couldn't just apply muslin as a backing to one's chosen upholstery material. )

Another handy tip - If you're going to use zips to close openings, don't use metal zips!

 

[Tranona]

Or do what my wife did:
Take boats cushions to local upholsterer and ask for a price. (Not in the UK so price probably less than material costs there).
Collect smart new cushions a few weeks later.

Exactly my approach. When doing up boats you have to decide what you can do yourself and what is best done by professionals. Problem with upholstery is that prices vary enormously and in both the boats I showed earlier I use non marine firms that were substantially lower cost than "specialists". not always easy to find good well priced suppliers but if anybody is south coast based recommend sewtrim.co.uk

 

[lustyd]

A two inch seam allowance ?

Don’t listen to these people!! Seam allowance should be about 1/2” and is what you use as the guide when sewing, not the wonky lines you’ve drawn. This alone will drastically improve quality of your work.

 

[Roberto]

When I had mine sewn by a professional, he took a look at the dozen I had of various shapes and sizes and said "bigger/smaller, count one meter for each cushion, you'll see". Spot on He was the retired upholsterer of the US Navy base at Rota, Spain.

 

[lustyd]

Probably reasonable in the saloon where cushions are about a metre, but in berths they are 2 metres long and often too wide a circumference to make from a single width. I'd be surprised if I could do my master berth with less than 8 linear metres of fabric and that only has two cushions (yes, it's enormous!). The offcuts from this would probably only be useful for edges on the rest as it would be too narrow even for the cushion backs in the saloon.

 

[steve yates]

When I had mine sewn by a professional, he took a look at the dozen I had of various shapes and sizes and said "bigger/smaller, count one meter for each cushion, you'll see". Spot on He was the retired upholsterer of the US Navy base at Rota, Spain.

Roberto am I right in thinking you have a longbow? If so was that 12m for all the saloon and v berths cushions and backs?

 

[Roberto]

Roberto am I right in thinking you have a longbow? If so was that 12m for all the saloon and v berths cushions and backs?

Hello,
I have a 40 footer, though human body dimensions are usually the same I just recounted them, he made the fore cabin and the two aft cabins, 9 cushions in total, all 15cm thick. The forecabin is composed of pieces with different shapes, rectangular trapezoidal triangular; the aft cabins have two long pieces each (to insert the lee cloth lengthwise between them)
3x cushions about 50x50cm
2x cushions about 50x80
2x about 200x50
2x about 200x80
IIRC I bought about 9m, he asked for an additional meter of a sort of mesh fabric to use in the underside of the aft cabin pieces, once the work was done he gave me back the remaining fabric cloth, I used it to sew a couple of small bags.
He surely had the experience to judge the amount of total cloth simply looking at the pieces, as said if all your cushions are 200X100 the needed number of fabric meters would surely be higher than the cushions number.

 

[steve yates]

Really useful, thanks Roberto