A long time ago I had Jon build me a Parson style console for our living room. Everything on the market was a bit too skinny for my liking so we had to go the DIY route.

A quick trip to Home Depot for some 2’x4′ and my amazing husband came up with this:

We then had to use joint compound to fix the grooves and give us a smooth surface to work with.

Then I got pregnant, had Hudson and life became super busy so it sat in the basement for a while and then a couple of months ago it made it up to the living room:

It stayed like this for another couple of months and then finally a couple of weeks ago we had a free weekend to just stay home and work on it. Finishing meant covering the whole thing in grasscloth.

Here is how we tackled it:

You will need:
-A roll of grasscloth wallpaper (I use to order budget friendly grasscloth from a wallpaper book called Decortor’s Grasscloth, but it looks like it’s been discontinued)
-Wallpaper paste
-Seam roller
-Wallpaper brush
-Foam brush
-Electric stapler
-Scissors
-Fabric glue

***We had a couple of failed attempts using hot glue and cement glue and wallpaper paste is worked out perfectly.***

Step 1: We wanted to do this project with the least amount of seams possible. The first cut you are going to make is for the top sections of the console. You will need a piece of wallpaper long enough to start at the base of one leg and be able to go up and over to the base of the opposite leg. Brush on wallpaper paste once it’s cut:

Step 2: Make sure to smooth our air bubbles. We used a foam wallpaper brush and our hands to get a smooth surface:

Step 3: Use the rollers to get a crisp edge:

Now since the width of the wallpaper is larger than the width of the console you’ll have excess paper on the front and back. This excess is good because you can fold it underneath the console and have nice finished edges and your seams will be underneath the console.

Step 4: In order to fold the excess underneath the console you’ll need to tackle the corners:

 Step 5: Repeat the corner process above on the 3 other corners. Once you are done it will look like this:

Step 6: The wallpaper paste does a great job of holding the wallpaper in place, but we wanted a little extra support on the pieces directly underneath the top of the console, because of the weight of the grasscloth so, we added a couple of staples:

Step 7: The final part of the console is to cut the pieces for underneath the console. Instead of one continuous piece we cut 3 separate pieces. Along with cutting them down in height we cut the sides as well to get the perfect seam. Once the pieces were cut and coated with wallpaper paste we applied it to the console right on the edges:

Step 8: Since you are cutting these panels down to size on both the top/bottoms and sides you might want to make them a little bit larger so you don’t cut them too small and then get rid of the excess with razor for a clean cut. Repeat steps with the other two sides.

Step 9: Because of the nature of grasscloth wallpaper there can be a little bit of fraying when you cut it. It wasn’t a huge issue, but we had a couple of frayed hairs on the corners so we used a little fabric glue and applied it corner seam to prevent the fraying:

Step 10: Let everything set for 24 hours and then enjoy your new piece of furniture!

Close up of finished corner:

Whew! Now I know why grassclothed pieces of furniture cost so much. At the end of the day it wasn’t really hard just time consuming. Once you got into the swing of it though it was pretty easy to do.

*In the past when we had tried to grasscloth furniture we never got a result we liked so we are super happy with this result. Our original plan was to lacquer it as well, but we tested out covering grasscloth with a high gloss acrylic coating of poly and the grasscloth just soaked it up and we did not get a lacquered finished.