What is cardboard furniture? Where to start and what to do

Making furniture from cardboard - a new trend of Western industry - has gradually captured our country. Original, cheap and functional items made literally from garbage, really something special and non-standard, worthy of attention. Now on the Internet you can find a lot of different information describing and advertising furniture from cardboard. A master class with detailed step-by-step instructions is also not uncommon. Schemes, drawings and patterns for furniture are published in books and magazines on design. You can also get acquainted with ready-made, so to speak, embodied ideas and numerous reviews of those who use it in all. What is it, cardboard furniture?

They make it from a packaging corrugated cardboard by a certain technology, over which engineering thought worked, so this furniture is durable, and given the simplicity of production and the unusualness of the material, which gives unlimited possibilities for design, it is also beautiful. Various forms of pieces of furniture, sometimes the most unexpected, are combined with the wide possibilities of decor - painting, painting, decoupage, pasting with various natural materials, fabric upholstery, etc.

The availability and cheapness of the building material, the low cost of other technological processes, the broadest possibilities in revealing the creative potential of the designer allow us to tackle this kind of craft and make furniture from cardboard with our own hands, and if you like and get it, then even organize your business.

As already mentioned, ordinary packaging cardboard is used for work. And, if you have a box from the refrigerator or a TV box, let it become the "first swallow" in the future production, because one box will, of course, not be enough, so you will have to walk to the nearest store and stock up a large number of packing containers.

Cardboard furniture. Necessary tools and materials

In addition to the main material - cardboard, you will also need: wrapping paper, sharp cardboard cutting knife, glue gun, PVA glue, Moment glue that is used for gluing large surfaces, wood glue, universal wallpaper glue, wood varnish, tracing paper, Centimeter, pencil and brush, grinding paper.

In the manufacture of furniture used cardboard of different thicknesses. If you look at the cut, you can see a wavy interlayer, the thickness of the cardboard depends on the number of these layers, and they can be from one to three. Thin, single-layer cardboard is used for those sections of the structure where special strength is not required, for sealing the inner walls of the product, for rounded constructions, etc. Furniture from cardboard is glued from several layers, shifting them with ribs of stiffness from strips of the same cardboard. It is important, when combining a multilayered part, to take into account the direction of the interlayer waves. For greater strength, one detail is cut out so that the waves are located along, and the next, across, etc.

Outside, ready-made furniture made of cardboard is pasted with brown or white kraft brown paper, using wallpaper paste. This gives the design a finished shape, makes the surface smooth and smooth and prepares for further finishing. The paper should not be cut with scissors, only with a knife.

The better to cut cardboard?

For this purpose, a jig saw that will save time, and create a sharper, even edge for the part. Using a jigsaw, you can saw several layers of cardboard at once. When cutting with a knife, you should always use a metal ruler, which is installed along the cutting line.

Where to begin?

Begin to test the technology from small forms, for example, from furniture for a children's room. It can be a small table, a shelf or a sofa chair. In addition, you can attract the child to this activity, then the furniture made together will become his favorite.

For example, first try to make an ottoman. Its dimensions will be 50 by 50 cm. For work, sheets of cardboard, PVA glue, glue gun, thin foam for the side surfaces and thicker for the seat, thick kraft paper, upholstery fabric for the cover will be required. From the sheets of cardboard it is necessary to cut out square pieces of 50x50 cm and strips of 50x5 cm for the stiffeners. We paste the strips on one side of the cardboard squares at a distance of 15 cm from each other. Then all the squares are glued together so that the ribs run inside the structure. There should be so many squares that after joining them together, our pouf would have the necessary dimensions and would be a solid cube. We paste it on the sides with paper using PVA glue. Let the product dry well. Now we paste the seat from the cardboard on top. The side walls of the pouffe are pasted with a thin foam rubber, on the seat we put a part cut from a thicker material. On top of the puff we cover with a cover made of upholstery fabric, plush or artificial fur, sewn according to its size.