Upcycling furniture is a pastime that people have been embracing for decades – and it’s experienced a strong revival more recently.

A growing interest in environmentally friendly and cost-effective ways to refresh your home has been at the heart of this. If you’ve not considered giving old items a new lease of life before, here’s why you should give it a go.

Environmental Benefits:

The very premise of upcycling is eco-friendly by nature. It’s all about prolonging the lives of items that already exist in the world by giving them some TLC.

This way, we don’t need to rely on buying new pieces that involve carbon emissions and the extraction of raw materials. It also reduces the likelihood of an item ending up in landfill, therefore generating unnecessary waste.

You might upcycle your own products to give them a better purpose within your home or you might do it so you can sell them on second-hand marketplace platforms.

Cost-effective Home Improvement:

Another advantage of upcycling is the budget-friendly aspect. Sprucing up an existing piece costs far less than buying a new item. Alternatively, you can buy great upcycled pieces for reasonable prices if you don’t fancy having a go yourself.

Personalisation and Creativity:

The best part about upcycling is that you can add your own unique spin. If you’ve decorated the rest of your home, you can simply make a few tweaks so your chosen item helps to blend into the space seamlessly.

This can be done with a lick of paint to match your new theme or through upholstering, for example. Adding entirely bespoke pieces is the ideal way of pulling together a cohesive home with a sense of personality.

Choosing the Right Materials

Keen to give it a go? The first step is to plan everything out. This means working out what you’d like to change and also deciding on the types of materials and equipment you’ll need to achieve this.

Selecting durable and versatile materials, such as OSB can enhance the quality and longevity of your upcycled furniture, so it’s worth taking your time to get this right.

If you plan to work with textiles, again, you should look for fabrics that will help you achieve a high-quality finish.

Keep an eye out for materials that would work well for an upcycling project, such as wooden pallets for outdoor seating or a section of old furniture that can be repurposed into a storage unit of some kind. 

The possibilities are endless when it comes to upcycling, so let your imagination do the work first. Then, you can pull together the logistics.