Making Your Furniture at Home Reserve

You’ve just placed an order with Home Reserve. So what happens now? Come along as we show you what happens on our side of the internet after you hit the buy button. Here’s how we make your sofas, loveseats, ottomans and lounge chairs.

Your order comes up on our computer screen within seconds of your having hit that button. As we start work on your order, we’ll first pull the fabric pattern you’ve ordered out of our inventory of fabric rolls and spread it out on the cutting table. The cutting guide program for your item–sofa, loveseat, chair or ottoman–is called up on our CNC cutting equipment and the program is activated. Having all the fabric pattern cutting automated means that every piece is precise and when sewn together is going to fit on the furniture properly.

As the fabric pieces are ready, we take them over to the stitching stations to start sewing them together. We have sewing specialists for all the different cover parts. For instance, every sofa seat cushion, loveseat back cushion, chair front edge and ottoman base will be sewn by a particular specialist. All of our machines have onboard computers which regulate the stitching operation and automatically back-tack and trim threads. It is quite fascinating to watch and if ever you are in the Fort Wayne area you are invited for a visit to see for yourself how this all works.

Once the fabric sets are completed, they’ll be packaged in a plastic bag, laid in the bottom of the shipping box and moved to the next stage, which is the building of the back cushions. To help you understand that process, let us ask, “Have you ever been to a ‘Build-a Bear’ store? The place where kids make their own teddy bear dolls by selecting an empty sewn bear casing and blowing in the stuffing?” If you have, then you’ve seen the type of equipment we use to blow the fiber into our back cushions. We use a machine just like theirs, only bigger.

Using this fiber blowing equipment, we fill sewn casings with polyester fibers and get a good comfortable back cushion. When finished, these back cushion are added to the shipping box that contains the fabric covers.

Next up is the shrink pack station. This is where we mix in a patented process. (US Patent # 6,267,446). When we engineered this system we discovered it held the key to shipping our sofas and all our furniture for that matter–lounge chairs, loveseats, ottomans, 2 cushion sofas, 3 cushion couches–in UPS size boxes.

All the foam pieces necessary for the item are assembled and placed in a very large plastic bag on the shrink-station table. The air is drawn out using a vacuum pump and the entire package compresses down to UPS specifications!

When UPS delivers the sofa and you open the package, the foam expands back to original shape within a couple minutes. Once you see this you’ll be able to understand the answer to our most frequently asked question: “How do you get those full size sofas in small UPS size boxes?”

While the fabric cutting, sewing and foam pack steps are being completed, the wood frames are being finished. The parts are cut from oriented strand board called OSB. It is the same material that builders use on the exterior of houses. It is made in Northern Michigan out of Aspen trees.

We take 4’x8’ sheets of the material and position it on a very large Routing machine. Woodworkers out there will be interested to know that it is exactly the same process used for home workshop routers but on a much larger scale. Every frame part is produced within 20/1000 tolerances. It has to be that close because with our ready-to-assembly shipping method, the couches and loveseats are going to be put together by you readers out there and you are looking for “easy assembly”.

Once the frame parts are cut and packed we print out instructions and put them in the box as well.

The frame boxes will then be taken over to the shipping station where they are matched up with your foam and fabric box. Your shipping address information is entered into the computer in order to print the UPS labels.

Now it is time to attach the shipping labels and slide the box down the line to await the UPS man! Once they pick up the package, they send you an email with the tracking number. That’s where you come back into the story.


And there you have it, that’s what is happening on our side of the web. The real interesting part of the adventure of course is the plan you have for the furniture once it reaches your house.


We hope to make it possible for you to try out all your design ideas by combining your online shopping skills with our styles, fabrics and direct pricing.