DIY Ottoman for the Beach Cabin

When your friend shows up with her kids and a staple gun, you know it’s going to be a great DIY morning. This morning, we were attempting to recover an old storage ottoman that had been through all of the things (stains, dirt, babies using it as a pull up, kids using it as an indoor trampoline, etc).

*This post contains affiliate links.

Anyway, my husband and I put the sad ottoman in the storage room until that next trip to Goodwill and filled it with all of our old DVDs. Luckily my actions don’t always match my intentions, so there it sat… and then came the perfect spot for it at the beach cabin…. and then my neighbor friend found a tutorial from Little Green Notebook with the best idea for using a shower curtain to reupholster a bench (check it out here… she even links to an inexpensive bench to buy if you aren’t a procrastinator like me).

To Target I went with the kids in tow. They made plans to do a bit of their own shopping as well. Of course. We made a quick stop in the shower curtain aisle and landed on this design. I bought two but we ended up only needing one. (check out this post where we also used a Target product not entirely as intended).

But bak to our DIY day…

Does anyone else have a basement full, FULL of toys, and the kids NEVER go down there… That’s our house. So, naturally, I thought I’d just leave the bench downstairs for us to recover and, just as naturally, our kids decided that the basement seemed like the perfect place to play on DIY day. Such is life.

Jen came over and we got started. Well… first we unloaded all of our movies (thank goodness she has a good sense of humor and can be paid for her work with old 80’s DVDs). Next, I had to locate a Phillips screwdriver to take the bench apart. (Yes, it would have been helpful if I had done this prior to the actual DIY session. Thank goodness Jen is also super patient). Then, we started by staple gunning (that’s a verb, right?) the longest sides of the top part first with the staples about 2 inches apart. Then, we folded the the edges like we would wrap a present.

We started the bottom storage part by also stapling the longest sides first. Fortunately we were also able to half wrap and staple the fabric around the legs while still keeping it fairly taut I guess it would also be a possibility to let it hang as more of skirt over the legs but I really liked the legs showing for the beach cabin. Again, we just birthday-present wrapped the bottom. It isn’t perfect but it is certainly a great fit for the beach cabin. As I’ve learned with other DIY projects, I just need to keep going throughout the project and the details kind of take care of themselves.

Many thanks to Jen for helping/letting me pretend to help- haha! More on my DIY-wanna-be/ non-DIY lifestyle in future posts 😉

Oh, and here is a quick photo of the overall Beach Cabin living room, just so you can see how well the DIY storage goes with the rest of the room.

Have a great weekend everyone!