IKEA Tidafors sofa slipcover hack

A little bit sick of the way your Tidafors sofa looks, and want to give it a makeover? Thinking of having it re-upholstered but don’t want to spend thousands?

Well a little DIY, persistence and slipcovers from Comfort Works may help you do just that. Here’s the original sofa:

Before the Hack

If you want to skip the post to see the after, simply scroll to the bottom.

It wasn’t as tough as expected, but it did require a bit of time to ensure not to cut into the foam accidentally. Overall it was quite fun and if you’re thinking of changing up your Tidafors sofa with a slipcover – we’re now able to help 🙂

Let’s walkthrough how we did this, shall we?

Cutting it up

We’ve always told our customers that we can’t make slipcovers for the Tidafors sofa because it’s entirely upholstered firstly, and secondly there are two armrest cushions which will not allow for a nice form-fitting cover.

What do we do?

We get rid of the everything that stands in our way of making a beautiful slipcover for it – this would mean separating the seat and back cushions from the frame, and cutting out the armrest cushions completely.

Cutting the armrest cushions Cutting seat cushions Seat upholstery cut opened

Taking the sofa apart

It isn’t exactly easy to cut such a large sofa up as-is, so it may be a good idea to disassemble the sofa bit by bit – especially at the places where you have to cut the seats.

Locating connecting points Disassembled armrest Disassembled armrests Disassembled backrest

Resume cutting

Once everything’s more or less taken apart, we can go back to cutting what needs to be cut. Do be careful not to damage the foam as you’ll still need this.

Cutting the back cushion upholstery

Before you know it, here’s what the frame should look like more or less when everything’s cut out.

Clean up the frame Remnants of threads leftover

Depending on how pedantic you are, you can use x-acto knives to trim off any excess upholstery left but as long as it’s 95% gone, putting the slipcovers over it would mean that it’s going to be hidden anyway.

Not to mention, there will be seat and back cushions to cover up any imperfections from the frame.

Putting it back together

Once you’ve got your pieces i.e. two seat cushions, two back cushions and two armrest cushions – it’s time to re-assemble and put on some new covers.

Removing seat foam cushions

We wanted to turn the armrest cushions into lumbar cushions by taking out the foam and trimming it down. As you would see in the final picture however, we trimmed a little too much.

Hacked Tidafors Sofa 2 Seater with Slipcovers Hacked Tidafors 2 Seater sideview

And there you have it – our very own Tidafors Sofa Slipcover Hack.

What do you think? Is this something you would do?

Let us know in the comments below!