Problem found.
The box was really showing its age. Not only that, but about two seconds after we brought it home, one of the cats decided that the box would make a perfect scratching post. The end results was a wildly unattractive box and shreds of wicker all over the house.
I thought that perhaps I would try my hand at refinishing the box with some fabric. After all, it couldn't look any worse, right?
The first step was dismantling the top and then stripping off all the old wicker so that the box was naked and less...pokey.
I had originally planned on simply using a staple gun to attach the fabric. Once I stripped the box down, though, I realized that it was made of thin chip board--too thin for staples alone. Instead, I applied wallpaper glue to the entire box and wrapped the fabric around it. (Jasmine, who loves everything elephants and everything pink, chose the fabric, of course.) Binder clips worked nicely to hold the fabric onto the box while the glue dried.
The bottom of the box had a wooden edge, and the top side panels were thick, so I was able to use staples there--this was really about the easiest part, and I got to use my staple gun. *ka-CHONK*
The trickiest part was securing the fabric to the inside of the box. I couldn't use staples of any sort, and the wallpaper glue didn't seem to grab on as well as I thought it would need to. I ended up using a generous amount of fabric glue along that inside lip of fabric.
I found that the hinges for the lid would not come off of the box, so I had to work around those. My solution wasn't the most elegant, but it worked.
The lid had two pieces. I thought about leaving the inside panel off entirely, but I wasn't satisfied with it--and the exposed inside of the lid wasn't all that nice next to the pink elephants. I used a spray adhesive for this part since I was working with a smaller (and probably less abused) section. I let Jazz pick out what kind of fabric to put inside. Can you guess what she chose?
These edges wouldn't be exposed, so I left them rough and used double-sided tape to hold them down long enough for me to flip it over and staple it to the top.
And the end result:
The project didn't take as long as I thought it might, and I was pleased with the results. If I ever do a similar project, I think I'll add some batting to soften it up so that it is a bit more forgiving if little faces fall into it. Not that Evie would know anything about that...
