The Story Of How We Built A Loveseat With Amazon Prime Boxes
Or you can skip the read and watch the timelapse video. Enjoy!
If you read our review of Amazon Prime or watched the review video, you know that I absolutely love Amazon and Prime membership. I love the free two day, one day, same day, and same hour shipping arrangements. I love the free and easy returns. And I love the customer service. The only thing that I don’t like about Amazon is that they don’t yet have a good selection of furniture, so I have to look elsewhere for related purchases. This is the root of the problem which led to the solution you are about to read about.
Don’t feel like reading? Here’s the full timelapse of how we built our loveseat from Amazon Prime boxes:
Moving to San Francisco
In anticipation for my new software engineering role at Medium, my girlfriend and I moved from Philadelphia and NYC respectively to San Francisco. We found and apartment and moved in with nothing but our clothes, laptops, some books, and a some miscellaneous belongings. Aside from the fork, pot, and butter knife we were carrying, we had nothing to eat from, drink from, or cook in upon moving in. With that, we had to move quickly to furnish our new home.
Amazon to the Rescue
In just five days, we spent around $1400 on about 40 items on Amazon. We bought our TV, toaster, utensils, pots, and a bunch more. Our home was coming together, but we were also accumulating a bunch of boxes because we didn’t know how to dispose of them in our new building. We decided to just keep them in our kitchen until we were done getting settled and could dispose of all of them at once. That led to this:
The boxes grew into a mountain. The only thing we needed but couldn’t get off of Amazon was our couch. It had to meet both mine and Tab’s high standards and also be vegan. Amazon would not be able to fit this bill, so we had to look elsewhere. We ended up purchasing our new black, vegan couch from Wayfair — you know, that company with the commercial that has the dancing people furnishing their homes. Unfortunately, they are not able to deliver as quickly as Amazon, so we wouldn’t receive our couch for three weeks.
That meant, we would have to eat on our bed, watch shows on our bed, not have guests, and do everything that involved sitting either on our bed or one of our hard moving bins. Then there came the idea to make our own couch.
Why Not Build Our Own Couch
We desperately needed somewhere to sit. We also needed something to do for entertainment since we were living on savings while I awaited my start date and Tab looked for a new job. It only made sense to use the boxes we had gathered to build ourselves a place to sit and watch Wayward Pines, our favorite show that seems to be in a place a limbo between off-season and cancelation. Once we both had free time and energy, it was time to build.
Using Our Prime Boxes to Build Our Loveseat
The boxes numbered somewhere between 60 and 90 as some items came in reinforced packaging. The space they consumed measures about 7 feet high by 8 feet wide. This was the plan to make use of those boxes to build our couch:
The Goal
Build a couch to sit on.
Materials We Needed
Of course, that was only a rough plan. I thought we’d need ten boxes to make up the surface of the couch, but all we needed were five boxes to make up the surface and as many as necessary others to use as stuffing in the surface boxes. The stuffing is for reinforcement against the weight of our bodies; those are the crossed squares you see in the picture above.
The round shapes you see symbolize bubble wrap that was used for comfort. We ended up putting bubble wrap under, above, and around the seat. We also put bubble wrap on the arms of the couch for added comfort. Comfort was to be treated as a luxury in this project and so we were not concerned with how much bubble wrap we had. We just knew that we would put it everywhere so long as we had extra.
Necessary Tools
Tape; that’s all. You can add a speaker to play upbeat music if you wish.
I ordered a box of 6 rolls of Scotch packaging tape from Amazon Prime to add to the one we had leftover from moving. With seven rolls, we had enough breathing room to not have to be concerned about running out. That was important because the more you have to worry about tape consumption, the less fun this can be. I went crazy with the tape and we had fun. By the time we finished, we had used five of the seven rolls we started with.
Team Makeup
It could be done with one person, but the process was much more efficient and fun with two people at work.
End Result
After about 90 minutes, we had our loveseat and a footrest. The couch fits us both comfortably and can withstand us bouncing around in it. We don’t even have to be careful about how quickly and with how much force we sit in the couch. After cleaning up, we sat back and watched some YouTube videos.
A couple weeks later, after our professionally manufactured couch arrived from Wayfair, we had company. Our company brought his company along to raise the population of our living room to five. Unfortunately, our Wayfair couch only seats three people. Without our loveseat, we wouldn’t have had enough space for all five of us. Here’s a picture of our loveseat next to our Wayfair couch:
Couch Features
- Seats two
- Unexpectedly comfortable
- Comes with footrest
Couch Specifications
- Maximum Width: 67 inches
- Maximum Height: 31 inches
- Sitting Area Width: 47 inches
- Sitting Area Height off ground: 15 inches
- Sitting Area Back Height: 15 inches
- Sitting Area Depth: 20 inches
- Maximum Arm Height: 23 inches
Thanks for Reading
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