Fixer-Upper-Roller-Coaster (Part 2, the large appliance edition)
Let’s see, where did we leave off? Oh yes, after spending an intense month-and a half doing more demolition work than reconstruction work, we had just woken up in our 112-year-old house for the first time (Read that blog post if you dare.). The morning light was streaming through what I thought where called “muttons.” They were muntins.
At that moment, we had no working stove, no working water heater, no washer, no dryer, no way to get from the bedroom to the kitchen without walking outside the house, and no coffee. The apartment still needed to be cleaned out and something was terribly wrong with our Subaru. Ryan was still working one and half jobs, and one of his jobs was like a job and a half, so if you are doing the math, he had two jobs. And Daughter, well, she was just trying to be helpful.
Here’s a bit of the roller coaster that we put ourselves on this fall:
Hooray, we’re in our new house!
What is that terrible clanking and rattling? Lovely. They are using a power shovel to break up the intersection right out there. Just wait– a big chunk of plaster is going to fall off the ceiling during one of these miniature earthquakes. Oh, and now the toddler is awake– and afraid.
Well, it sure will be nice living on a cul-de-sac while they work on the road! All the neighbor kids are out playing in their yards and biking on the street! We didn’t know we were moving into such an awesome neighborhood!
It doesn’t feel like our house yet. It feels like we are camping here. For instance, where’s the coffee?
Gas station coffee!
I’m going to totally plastic off these two rooms that we have torn up so that Daughter doesn’t get into the tools or eat any paint chips. But now we can’t walk between the kitchen and the rest of the house.
But we’ll get those rooms done soon! Or we’ll re-open the passageway from the landing to the kitchen! We don’t need that extra pantry!
Back to the apartment to box up the rest of our junk. So much junk. Let’s just eat everything in the fridge so we don’t have to move it.
Beef tongue and corn on the cob make a delicious supper!
I guess all this food we have left is stuff Ryan can’t eat. Oh well, he got called in to work anyway.
Hey, you’re off work for a few hours! Let’s get our stove up and running!
Of course. Flexible gas pipe kits come with all these adapters, and none fit this sixty-year-old stove.
Ace really is the helpful place!
This old brass flexible gas pipe has probably been here for sixty years, which is probably why it leaked gas. And also why it absolutely will not budge. And we can’t find the breaker bar. When we stuck all this stuff in the garage, we didn’t think we would need the breaker bar right away.
I found the breaker bar in the basement! And my husband is so strong and handsome! Look at him install that flexible gas pipe. And look, no bubbles! Let’s make bacon! And then turn off the gas to this line again, just to be safe!
Back at the apartment. So tired of cleaning.
This apartment is so clean now! Management will be in awe of how clean this apartment is!
What do you mean, you can feel dust on the baseboards? Do you want to come to my 112-year-old house and feel 112-year-old dust on baseboards? Do you want to tell me what you think of the cleanliness of the kitchen at my house? Huh? Do you?
I’m done! I re-cleaned everything! I don’t care if it’s clean enough, I’m going home and tomorrow I’m going to turn in the keys and we will only have one place to worry about!
Hey, Ryan? I’m in the Hy-Vee parking lot. The car is overheating again. It’s eating all the coolant. Will you come after your done with work and make sure we make it home?
We made it home! And Ryan is sure he knows what the problem is!
The problem is the head gasket. This car is not going to move again until Ryan replaces that gasket.
It’s a good thing that Ryan is so handy! And that I didn’t make him get rid of his engine hoist! And it’s a good thing we are done with our month of having two places! And that we just moved to a more walkable neighborhood!
How are we going to get checked out of the apartment tomorrow and get Ryan to work(s)?
With deft logistical coordination, we have gotten checked out of the apartment! I’m going to go home and relax!
I can’t relax. There is too much to do.
Let’s do it!
Well maybe I could get something done if I didn’t have to spend all my time going outside to go back and forth between the front of the house and the back of the house.
But it sure is nice to go outside in a neighborhood where all your neighbors are outside hanging out on their porches and working on their houses!
We should probably call the utility company and tell them we think we might still smell gas around the stove so that they come check it.
The gas smellerometer says you installed the pipe perfectly! Go Ryan!
Oh, but there’s still gas leaking out of these “Warm-R-Burner”s.
Ah, those are supposed to be pilot lights! Let’s get those lit!
Hmm, they don’t seem to want to light. Careful there, don’t unscrew that knob too much. Poof, flames all in the stove, where utility guy just had his hand. Sprinting to the basement to turn off that gas line now.
Everything’s fine! The utility guy is unharmed! I saved the day with a pipe wrench!
Let’s just not use the pilot lights. Let’s just screw them shut and light our beautimous vintage stove with a lighter. And add a gas shut-off valve somewhere closer to the stove.
Not using the pilot lights will save us $15 in gas every month!
Now that we know the stove works, let me expend energy cleaning it. Oh look, mouse turds.
Power washers are fun!
Power washers make mud splash up all over the stove pieces I am trying to clean.
Okay, finally got everything back in the house, triple wiped down, and reassembled. Hooray, stove! Time for a bath!
Yeah, this water heater is more like a water warmer.
It’s the dip tube! After hours of careful internet research, I am sure it is the dip tube!
No, guy at the plumbing store, not a drip tube. A dip tube.
We got it installed! $6 in parts and our 25-year-old water heater now makes hot water! My husband is so handy! I’m sure that this old water heater is not very energy-efficient, but think of the embodied energy in a new one! Let’s go show this old disintegrated dip tube to the guys at the plumbing store! It’ll be educational! Let’s tell our friendly neighbors about our water heater victory!
This tub does not hold water. There it goes, down the closed drain.
O-ring for the win!
This laundry is really starting to pile up. When are you going to pick up that used set from your friend?
Yay! We’re getting the washer and dryer this weekend!
Just kidding– next weekend.
Yay! We’re getting the washer and dryer this weekend!
Just kidding– next weekend.
[Somewhere in there Ryan switched to just working one job, presumably because he ran out of clean polos.]Yay! We’re getting the washer and dryer this weekend!
Just kidding– next weekend. The laundry pile is now occupying an entire bedroom.
Here comes Ryan with the washer and dryer! Good thing because I am completely out of underwear! And shirts! And pants!
The dryer needs a new glow plug? It’s a special order part?
It’s a good thing this set was so cheap! And that there’s a laundromat nearby that only costs an arm and a leg– I’ve got a couple of each to spare!
Once we get the laundry going, it’s going to be a pain in the butt to get laundry to the basement with these two rooms in between torn up.
Let’s open up that place where the staircase used to be!
What do you mean, you don’t think we should start any new projects? Well, of course we shouldn’t start any new projects, but this isn’t really a project, it’s a quick surgical operation that will soon pay for itself in saved time.
Yay, we’re going to saw through this paneling! I can see the parlor from the kitchen! I can move freely about my own home!
We should probably stick some stairs in that hole before our toddler tries to jump from the landing to the kitchen.
I built some janky steps out of pantry shelves and 2x4s! And the glow plug finally came!
Who knew that a glow plug is one of the most innermost parts of a dryer?
All systems go– let’s do some laundry!
The washer gets stuck halfway through the cycle and churns for hours. It’s set up to drain into the floor drain, which appears to have a slow clog. There’s water all over the floor. The dryer still won’t dry.
I’ve got one batch of jeans to dry on our backyard fence, which I am so thankful for! I’m going to wash another batch!
The washer just electrocuted me. Mildly, but still. I’m going to buy a new washer right now. If I had known I would need to buy a new washer, I would have done it a month ago. I just want to do some freaking laundry.
The washer doesn’t have a short, it just had a huge amount of static built up! Ryan grounded the washer to the water line, so it won’t shock anyone anymore! He also did some work on the drain tube so that the water won’t siphon out before the washer is full! We figured out that the vent pipe of the dryer was not lined up with the hole to the outside of the house (and apparently hasn’t been for a decade), so now that we lined it up, it should work fine!
Yeah, it still doesn’t work.
Oh look! I found a gallon of dog hair in the dryer after disassembling it for the second time this week!
You know, if we had been smart, we would have found that the first time we took it apart.
The dryer works! The washer works except for the permanent press cycle! I’m getting the laundry done! Even our friendly neighbors, who are working on their house right out there, are commenting on the lovely smell of fresh laundry! Don’t worry, neighbors, I’ve got fifteen more batches to do! I love you, neighborhood! I’m sending all my fresh laundry scent out to you!
(Well, that brings us to the end of September. October, November and December will have to wait, but compared to August and September, they’ve been a walk in the park.)
Gathering Projects
It seems we have this habit of gathering projects.
At some point this fall I was at a thrift store, and this chair ended up in the bed of our truck. Now that I’ve taken off the raggy little skirt it was wearing, I’m not sure if it needs to be reupholstered or just reattached at the upper corners. No worry– I’m sure by the time I get to this project the best plan will make itself clear.
Then there’s this pile of rocks that showed up in our back yard. And by showed up, I mean we rescued them from under pieces of asphalt and out of the cold, wet sand at the dump and we hauled them home (in five truck loads) and then wheelbarrowed them seven by seven to the back yard. If you ever want a delicious burrito, I highly recommend throwing and lifting and hauling a couple literal tons of pavers and then going out for burritos. They will be the best burritos you have ever tasted.
Besides the delicious burritos, all this work will also earn us a pretty spectacular patio– after we do a lot more work on it, of course.
And then there’s these walls in the basement.
This is already a huge aesthetic improvement compared to the paneling that once coated these basement walls. Now we just have to decide how much of the resourceful pallet framing to remove, how much of the poorly-formulated plaster to crumble off the bare walls, and what sort of crafts to do with all those pallets! Oh, the projects!
Last but not least (and not last either), we have the Hoosier cabinet. About a week after getting ourselves situated with all our coats and boots by the ever-practical side entry, we decided to buy a Hoosier cabinet. Then we decided to bring it into the house through said side entrance, because it would be a “straight shot into the dining room,” only to realize that the swinging door to the dining room would not let the Hoosier cabinet through. So this has been our entryway for the past few days:
I think we’ll get it into the dining room tonight if we can figure out how to get the swinging door off its hinges temporarily. Or maybe we’ll haul it back outside and try another way. Then the real project of fixing some drawers and reattaching some knobs and replacing a shelf will begin.
Actually, it will probably begin after we get some other more pressing projects done. It’s a good thing we like projects!
Fixer-Upper-Roller-Coaster (Part 1)
(In which I summarize two months of crazy into a long list of emotional thoughts.)
There are actually a lot of houses in our price range!
There are a lot of houses in our price range that should be torn down. Or used to house cats (again, but this time just cats).
Hey, Ryan, look at this one! Look at that attic! It could be my office!
I bet there’s something terribly wrong with it. I bet it reeks of stale smoke like that one house we looked at and has a mold infestation in the basement like that other house that we actually put a low-ball offer on.
Wow, this one has character! This is the best one we’ve looked at! This is our dream house! And it doesn’t stink! It just has a bit of old church aroma! Let’s make an offer!
We just made an offer on a house. That’s kinda scary.
Let me start researching plaster repair and deciding how I want to do the kitchen!
They rejected our offer. Our realtor is out of town. Their realtor is out of town. The world is coming to an end, and there is nothing we can do about it.
Everyone’s back in town! They accepted our second offer and they’re going to pay for closing costs! This is actually happening!
Wow. Look at this list of extra little problems that the inspector pointed out. Those kind of add up to a lot of work.
It’s a good thing we’re handy! And that we love to do projects together!
What? The guy who did our mortgage pre-approval was an idiot and we can’t actually get a mortgage?
Oh, but this other bank can help us!
No it can’t.
Oh, but this other bank can help us!
No it can’t. We can’t get the house. We can’t get any house. The end.
Hey, we finally got the correct papers to correctly verify the correct information and we can get a mortgage! This is really happening!
This is really happening. Like, no backing out now.
Wahoo!
You know, apartment life is really easy. I’m going to miss this.
But you know, apartment life is really boring! And confining! Let’s get packing! I love packing! It’s always part of a big adventure! Time for change and growth!
We have so much crap. So much crap. How did we get all this crap? We’re always so busy packing and moving that we don’t even have time to use half this crap. I hate packing.
Look at me go! I got all the books packed! This might be the last time they are packed for a really long time! And then they are going to be on some beautiful shelves that Ryan is going to build special for our beautiful house!
I probably should have sorted out some books to get rid of while I packed them.
Closing day is coming soon!
Closing day is coming way too soon.
It’s closing day!
Hmm. That seemed anti-climactic. I don’t even feel like a homeowner. I feel like we just bought a really expensive project. Maybe because that’s what we did.
Let’s rip off some paneling!
Oh my goodness. What is wrong with this wall? This is even worse than we expected.
Oh, ha! We just happened to rip off the piece of paneling that just happened to cover the absolute worst section of the wall! It’s all patchy because they re-ran the plumbing back in ’97, which is a good thing! It’s not all going to be that bad!
But it’s not like the rest of it is very good or anything.
I love these high ceilings! Now that we’ve got that false ceiling out, this room feels so much bigger!
Is that wallpaper on the ceiling?
I found a video on youtube that shows how to get wallpaper off easily!
That video wasn’t talking about 112-year-old wallpaper.
It’s off! We’re done!
With that step.
Mudding the closets– this should be fun! I’ve always liked to play with mud!
Skim coating a wall is kind of like frosting a cake. Except that you don’t get to give up and eat it.
I wonder why they put a false ceiling in this room– the ceiling is basically perfect!
Oh just kidding.
We’re getting a lot done! We have two rooms de-paneled, four false ceilings off, the tile out of the basement and the wallpaper out of three closets and off of one ceiling! Look at us go! We’re going to have two rooms upstairs and two rooms downstairs done by the time we need to move in! And it’s just going to go faster once we move in because then we won’t be spending an hour every day getting ready and going back and forth! And we’re going to get so much done this coming week when Ryan takes his paid vacation!
It is absolutely impossible for Ryan to take his paid vacation when other employees keep just not showing up.
We’re going to get stuff done anyway because we are the champions my friend!
We really need to make sure the stove is working before we move in. And the water heater doesn’t really seem to be getting the water hot. Also, let’s get all the mudding tools out of the bathtub before we need to use it. And when is your friend going to have time for you to pick up that washer and dryer he’s going to sell you?
Moving day soon! I am so ready to be done with this going back and forth crap!
We’re not going to get two rooms on the main floor and two rooms upstairs done.
But we’re going to get two bedrooms done!
We’re just going to get one bedroom done.
One bedroom done will be great! It’s going to look so good!
The hard part about painting is all the prep work. I forgot about the prep work. Didn’t we already clean around these windows? Why are they so dirty? And it looks like the last paint job was done by a drunken monkey.
It’s so cool that these windows have muttons! I think that’s what they’re called. Why would they be called that? I don’t know! But they are pretty!
It is hard to paint muttons.So. Many. Lines. I still don’t know why they are called muttons.
Ooh, pretty blue!
What? It’s midnight? I thought it was like, eight thirty or something. What movie should the toddler watch next? Cars again? Yeah, that’s fine.
Almost done! Teamwork!
Ugh. It dripped again. Someday someone’s going to say, “This looks like it was painted by a drunken monkey.” So tired. Don’t care.
It’s move day! Exciting things are happening! I’m making extra coffee!
That extra coffee is not cutting it. And the trailer that a friend was going to lend you is nowhere to be seen.
Donuts! You picked up donuts and a u-haul trailer! I’m going to make more coffee!
It’s noon already.
I’m so glad people can help!
Where does that go? Um, just stick it somewhere. Just stick it in the attic. Just stick everything in the attic and we’ll deal with it later.
More people to help!
So much stuff. All these people are going to think we are hoarders.
We’re not hoarders, we are people who are active in many creative pursuits! We are abundantly blessed! We have books to share! We have stuff for our kid to play with! We have a deep freezer full of food!
Seriously, more empty bottles? When are you even going to have time to homebrew?
I told you that both beds would fit in this one room! Ta-da! We’re going to sleep tonight!
But I’m not sure how we are going to cook breakfast.
There is a lot of light coming in that curtainless window– I must be waking up in… OUR house!
33 Things to Love About an Old House
There are, of course, things to despise about an old house, as I may detail in some later post. Hey, a bunch of these “things to love” are just cleverly-disguised banes of my existence. But some of these little details are truly charming. I would say that old houses tend to be detail-oriented… unlike myself. It’s amazing we seem to be getting along so well. I’ll chock it up to our little family’s unsuppressed optimism and the house’s “character.”
Storage to Steps
I’m sitting on the steps in what used to be the pantry that used to be steps. I convinced myself, and then Ryan, that we could use the steps more than we could use the storage. So two days ago we ripped through the hollow wall that had been added about forty years ago. Sure enough, the plaster came to a troweled corner just above our heads as we stood on the landing looking down into the kitchen.
Then yesterday I sawed and screwed the shelves and some other scraps into these three steps. When Daughter got home from her Saturday with Grandma, she crawled up and down and up and down the steps saying “¡Papá hizo!” I finally convinced her that her mama had made them. Ryan says “She thought I made them? See, that means you did a really good job.” He admits it is a boomerang compliment.
The truth is, the steps are crappy. For stringers, I used a network of 2x4s, a mixture of wood from the garage and from Menards. The treads are three of the pantry shelves. One is just wood, another is yellow paint that tested lead-free, and the third is wood with the same yellow paint just on its front edge and underbelly. I had to turn it over like that if I didn’t want splinters in my feet. There are three steps where there really should be five, which means the rise on each is 12″. I find that these oversized steps are perfect for sitting with a laptop and a cup of coffee. And besides, they are temporary.
But then, most everything in life is temporary. When we lived in an apartment, we were more keenly aware of this. We never really settled in. There was no point in hanging pictures on the walls when there was a wheelbarrow, a string trimmer, an engine hoist, a chest freezer, a work bench, a charcoal grill, a bag of drop cloths, a shovel, a spade, a rake, three hoses and a thousand tools just sitting in our allotted garage. Just sitting there, reminding us that there were parts of our lives that didn’t fit with an apartment.
Well, we’ve used about nine hundred of those thousand tools already on this house. And the drop cloths. And the yard tools. And Ryan’s got the engine hoist poised for use since the Subaru decided to blow a head gasket as we were taking the last few trips across town to empty out the apartment. Life is chaotic right now, but it’s temporary, right?
We are making steps. We are taking things out of storage. We are saying “I knew I had this somewhere” and “I didn’t know I had this in me.”
First week.
I guess it’s only been a week since we bought the house, but it seems like ripping paneling off of walls and cleaning grease off of kitchen shelves have been a part of my life for a long time.
Taking down this OSB false ceiling went rather quickly.
Cleaning the kitchen took two of A’s nap times, but I haven’t even done anything with the floor or the pantry yet. Maybe the contact paper I bought yesterday will help me feel better about putting my stuff on the shelves.
We are making good progress, especially considering that Ryan hasn’t had too much time to be at the house this past week. But we still have more removal to do before we can think about adding anything back.
Here’s a view from the living room to the dining room. Both rooms have now been completely depaneled. The process involves prying off all the trim, much of which must be labeled and set aside so that we can put it back in place once the walls are ready. If the previous owners hadn’t done such a good job of doing the same thing when they put up the paneling, but instead had just butted the paneling up to the edge of the trim, our job would be much easier. The most time-consuming part is pulling all the big, thick trim nails out the backside of the trim with a vise grip. Often some small chips of wood flake off as the nail comes through, which is why we don’t pull the nails out the front side of the trim. Thankfully the nail heads aren’t too big.
On Monday, my cousin Derek came and helped with the prying and pulling. It happened to be the muggiest day of the summer so far, which might be why the nails just didn’t want to let go, but we kept at it and finished this room before suppertime. Thanks for the help, Derek!
Since then, I’ve been doing more prying, pulling, labeling, stacking, and cleaning. A has been spending some time with her grandmas, some time watching Peppa Pig, and some time helping me hose down the front porch. Some day we’re just going to sit on that porch!
Worth waking a toddler from her nap
There are few things worthy of waking a toddler from her nap, but one of the few might be fetching your down payment from the bank before the bank closes the day before The Closing. So Daughter woke up to getting stuck in the car, which brought her to the magical land of mediocre popcorn, where she watched in awe as her mom swiped a debit card a dozen times. On the way out the door, Daughter spilled her popcorn on the rug, then scooped it back into the crinkly white bag and kept on munching. Rebecca just held on to the cashier’s check– the heaviest piece of paper she may have ever held.
Deciding to buy a house (and deciding on a house)
Sometime this summer, Daughter will move into the fourth home of her two-year-old life. And she likely won’t move again for quite a while (at least relatively speaking) because…
…we’re buying a house!
So, the outside looks pretty sweet. As do we. Look at those smiles! The closing date is set for the 18th.
We’re pretty excited about buying a house. We made the decision to go house shopping after making the (even harder) decision to stay in Sioux Falls, at least for the foreseeable future. Buying would let us either lower our monthly housing costs or at least let us build some equity. Or both. We started looking for a fixer-upper. We wanted something on the low end of its neighborhood that needed the kind of work that we could do with our homeowner skills– the skills that have been languishing during our time in an apartment.
We found a house in our price range with a lot more than we were expecting. We looked at a whole slew of houses with a lot of what one might call “potential.” This house has potential, charm, and space– space to grow and learn as a family, space to garden and brew, space to make some improvements and build equity, space to run new wiring and repair plaster…
Here’s Daughter trying to get back out onto that porch. As you can see, the inside needs some updating. But it’s livable the way it is. After all, someone was living there the way it is.
Nice high ceilings… some higher than others. Note the OSB ceiling– if you want to make a false ceiling even falser, that’s how to do it.
This house has character(s).
Here’s the kitchen. The cabinets above and around the sink are the only built-in cabinets in the kitchen. So we’re going to need to remodel with some more functional counter space– all planned around that awesome stove.
Here’s the staircase down to the side entrance and the basement. We’ll leave this the way it is at least for now.
The stairs go up to the bedrooms on the second floor.
The door on the left goes to some storage space. The door on the right goes to the big space in the attic!
This bedroom’s ceiling is in good condition. Most of the plaster in the house has been covered with paneling. We might have to replace a lot of the walls with drywall. I am anxious to pry off the paneling and find out what’s behind it!
The quartzite foundation appears to be in good condition.
This is what the listing claimed as a second bathroom. It will be redone at some point.
The backyard is the only part that is smaller than some of the other houses we looked at. It is also bigger than some we had looked at. So it is just medium-small. This corner has been overtaken by some lovely ferns and violets.
Did I mention that the house is walking distance from The Downtown Library? Mmhmm.
More pictures and videos and before-and-afters after the 18th!
Getting Rid of Shoes
These shoes are in the dump now. The crocs were worn through to the ground; the hiking shoes were falling apart at the seams. I had walked many miles in those shoes.
The hiking shoes were the ones I wore all over the side of Mt. Rainier the summer I met Ryan, but they were too big to fit in a scrapbook. Plus, I can’t get into scrapbooking because all of our other hobbies are already taking up too much space. We put a moratorium on new hobbies– at least 3D ones.
Speaking of space, the reason I was getting rid of shoes (and other stuff) is that we were looking for a house. I was purging as a promise– if we are blessed with more space, I promise not to fill it all up with junk.
We found a big old house with lots of character in our price range. How is that possible? Well, we have to fix the walls, the ceilings, the bathrooms, the kitchen, the garage door, and the wiring. Is learning to rewire a house considered a three-dimensional hobby? We’ll probably have to buy some new tools, which will take up space. It’s a good thing I got rid of two pairs of shoes.
How to Fix a Frumpy Couch
We like our couch– it’s comfy, it can double as a single bed, and Ryan got a really good deal on it. (We only like to buy something if we get a really good deal on it, because every time we use it, we want to think about how we got a really good deal.)
But at some point the back of the couch had been used as a temporary shelf, and the cushion on the left never recovered:
That was as straight as you could get it to stand up. This bothered me. I started looking at couches on craigslist, but they were all worse. I considered frumpifying the other cushion to match. However, I was able to get most of the frump out of the frumpy cushion by taking the stuffing out and doing some reformational work.
Here’s all the stuffing from the frumpy cushion, shown with the better cushion being used as a stencil to show me how to reshape the stuffing:
I found that most of the stuffing came in loose tufts, but there was also a corner of the cushion that had been stuffed with a big folded-up wad of batting (the stuff that comes in sheets). This was perfect, because it explained why the stuffing wasn’t working cohesively, and it gave me a big piece of batting to hold all the stuffing in the shape I wanted.
See how I wrapped the stuffing with the batting? That’s what allowed me to stitch it all together and keep it in that shape.
Making those stitches was pretty tricky since I didn’t have a long upholstery needle and I needed to get all that stuffing sewn away before Daughter woke up from her nap. So I invented the thimble-needle-cork method:
Basically, since my needle was much shorter than the pile of stuffing, I just used a thimble to stick the needle in from the bottom of the pile while I pressed a wine cork into the top of the pile with the other hand. Using my hand-hand coordination, the needle and the cork would (usually) meet in the middle of the pile of stuffing, the needle would get stuck in the cork, and I could pull the needle the rest of the way through. I only stabbed myself a couple of times.
So in six places on the cushion, I stitched down and then up through the whole pile of stuffing and batting and then tied a knot. I used doubled-up thread for extra strength.
If you don’t have a piece of batting to wrap around your stuffing, I would suggest buying some. This wouldn’t have worked with just stuffing.
After I got done reforming and stitching, I zipped the cover back on and put the cushions back on the couch. Not perfect, but much better! In this picture you can kind of see where the piece of batting ends, but now that the cushion has had a few weeks to settle in, you can’t see that line anymore. And it hasn’t started to slouch yet!
$0 spent, and I no longer feel the need to buy a new couch!