Thrifty Chair Makeover

For my very first DIY post, I'll keep it simple :) Lately, I feel like chairs have been coming out of thin air to me for a makeover. My father-in-law manages a local country club, and they were selling all of their dining chairs for $15.00 a piece. I snagged four of them (thanks to my amazing Mother-In-Law) and made two into chairs that we use in our living room, and the other two, we took the arms off of and used around our dining room table. I am a huge believer that things don't have to be expensive to be beautiful and functional. Sometimes I get frustrated while shopping at large chains for home decor. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Home Goods, as well as Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware. But, sometimes the Pottery Barn dining chair just isn't in the budget. Thrift stores, goodwill, and antique stores can give you furniture for much cheaper, and to me, those pieces are the ones that have the most character. The labor that you might have to put in to turn them into what you want can be tedious sometimes, but in my opinion, it's worth it.

Here are the chairs before their thrifty makeover. For some of you this might be your style, but for me, I thought they needed a nice coat of white paint and a change to those pleather seat cushions.

First step was to have my handy-dandy husband unscrew the seat cushions from the chair so that I could sand them and a prepare them for paint.

 Typically, for a furniture project like this, I would use chalk paint. I've worked with it quite a few times, and the coverage and easy ability to sand are unlike any other medium I've ever worked with. But, in order to keep the cost low on these, I mixed a few white and off-white paint samples that I had left over from picking out trim colors for our house.

 

After Evan unscrewed the cushions for me, I did a quick sand with 100 grit sand paper, just to "rough up" the wood. These chairs previously had a heavy coat of poly of them. In my opinion, I don't always find it necessary to completely sand the pieces of furniture down before painting. As long as the surface is somewhat rough, your paint will stay just fine.

Then, I started painting. I used a paintbrush on these instead of a small roller. It did take about three coats to get the coverage that I needed. This picture was taken after one coat. Depending on the color you use, or the amount of character you want your chair to have, you may not need three coats.

In the meantime while my paint was drying, I got to work on the cushions. For some reason, this was the part I was most excited about. I used left over fabric that I had from getting a chair recovered and a mudroom cushion made from Fabric and Fringe. It was a nice gray-ish linen that matches with the colors throughout our house. I first used a razor to cut around the staples from the previous cushion, so that it could be easily removed. Then, I laid and cut my fabric, and made sure that with each staple, the fabric was VERY tight. You want to make sure that you are pulling your fabric tight as you're stapling to reduce the risk of wrinkles. After you're done stapling, cut away the excess fabric.

Once my chairs had dried after the three coats, I then took more sandpaper to "rough" them up a little. I love the antique look of chairs, and wanted these to look distressed. It also helps if you had any drips or imperfections while painting, you can just sand away those areas to give more it character. After the second sanding, we reattached the cushions, and TA-DA!

 

These two chairs, we have in our living room in front of the fireplace. For the other two, I refinished the same way, except we removed the arms first so that they could sit at our dining room table. The chairs around our table are mismatched, but I love them that way. The other two chairs I bought from A Classy Flea in Marietta, $45 for the set. So, in total, my dining room chairs cost under $80 for the four of them. Not pictured, on the other side is a bench my husband built for additional seating. More to come on our dining room table and bench, as well as the board and batten tutorial.