My Lillberg Rocking Chair Makeover

When I was pregnant with Ezra my mom gave me $100 to use towards a rocking chair. Money was tight so our budget for a rocker was, well, $100. As you can imagine there aren’t really any good-looking modern options in that price range. The best we could do was the Lillberg Rocker from Ikea for $200. It was comfy, but a pretty AWFUL design for rocking babies. First of all, it hardly rocks. at. all. To get any sort of motion you’ve got to slouch back, scoot your bum forward and work it. Try doing that for an hour. Buns and thighs of steel, man. I kid you not. The second major flaw is the too low back. When you are freakin exhausted  at a 2 am feeding and you doze out your head will flop back and hit solid wood. If this doesn’t render you unconscious it will at least give you a nice big goose egg on the back of your head as a parting gift. The third flaw is that it is too deep. You just spent an hour rocking your baby to sleep only to wake him up during your uncoordinated, limb-flailing attempts to get from a nearly horizontal position to standing upright. UGH. I could go on and on.

When I was pregnant with Memphis my mom offered to chip in another $100 towards my dream rocker. This meant we would have to come up with an additional $895 on our end. Ha! After my success with selling my Ikea Pello chairs. I decided to try and sell my Lillberg and use that money towards it. That didn’t happen. I listed it a couple times and got a few nibbles, but no bites. Apparently in this area you have to ask next to nothing. I asked something like $30-40 for the pair of Pello chairs and had people beating down my door to get ahold of them. $75 for this one and no takers.

Oh, well. Now I’m actually really glad it didn’t sell. I just don’t think I could part with my newly made-over chair.

Here is my before:

Boring. Zzzzz……

And here is my after:

Hubba hubba! Come to mama! “You are hairy! Like animal!” (Austin Powers, anyone? Anyone?)

As you can imagine I spent hours slaving away on this makeover.

Not really. I just pulled out my Greek flokati. Shake. Toss. Tuck. Voila! I also turned the back cushion on its side to give more head support, but it looks great left down as well. It still isn’t good for rocking babies to sleep, but it makes for one super cute and comfy lounge chair to curl up in with a good book.