DIY Metal Chair Makeover

Hello cyber-world!

It's been far too long since my last visit.  *Shoutout to Chanel and Chara* I appreciate my sisters for doing their best to breathe life back into this blog, and I am going to try to do the same.

All I'll say is that it has been a crazy time in my life.  Our family has moved from Nevada to Indiana, and we're still settling in...I have almost nothing hung on the walls of my house, and each room has it's own stack (or two) of boxes left to unpack.  I have always been a West Coast girl, so adjusting to the weather & humidity here is still a little difficult for me.  But, despite all the challenges that this move has caused, I believe it has been, and will be, a good thing for our family.  One of the few constants in life is change.  All we can do is buckle up, say a prayer, and enjoy the ride!

I did this DIY a little while ago, but I just never made post about it.  So here goes!

Have you ever bought something because 1) it was really cheap, and 2) you could see potential for something awesome with a small, easy makeover, but then it just sat in your house looking sad and unfinished for years?  That's what had happened to me.

I bought these chairs off of a friend that was selling them for really cheap.  My vision for them over the years has changed slightly (as I have found that my decorating style has evolved over the past few years), but I finally found some fabric at Wal-Mart on clearance that I was ABSOLUTELY in love with!  So I brought it home, and decided the time had come to tear the chairs apart!

Luckily, the paint on my chairs wasn't peeling off like crazy.  I did not feel the need to sand it or remove the previous paint in any way (mostly because I'm lazy, but also because I was so excited to get started that I was ready to just jump right in).  I broke it down, bought some spray paint, and went straight to work!

While I patiently impatiently waited for each coat to dry, I would work on the cushions.

 This is the old fabric (on the left) next to the new fabric (on the right).

 

This is how I tackled this part of the project:

 

Step 1: Lay my old cushion (with the old fabric still on, because I'm not cool like my sister) on the new fabric, and cut out a rough square.  Pull the sides up and over to make sure it covers everything before you cut.

 

Step 2: Pull gently on the sides and start stapling them down on the backside.  You don't want to pull it too tight, or you'll have weird dips in your cushion on the other side.  So pull gently, but try to get it snug.

Step 3: The corners...some people have a specific strategy when it comes to their corners.  I just folded a little, and stapled it in place, and folded some more, and stapled in place. In the end, my corners looked just fine!

Step 4: Reduce some of the bulk around the corners.  All you have to do is take a pair of scissors and cut those little flags hanging off of each corner until it looks nice to you.

TA DA!

Step 5: This is the really fun part!  Once you have followed all the directions on your package of spray paint/clear coat (or...gotten so fed up with it that you settle for no clear coat because you just can't wait to finish...) you can put it all together!

Voila!  I was so happy with how these turned out.  I've got the bug now!  I want to recover every piece of furniture in my house!

Just too cute to pass up!

And don't they just look great with my newly acquired piece of furniture? (Thanks to my mother-in-law!  How did she know I would love it so much? <3)

I hope everyone has a happy Monday!

If you see a project, recipe, kids activity, or life hack that you'd like us to try, let us know!

DIY Chair Reupholstery

Well I think I have now caught the DIY bug.  Ever since I recovered our sofa, I want more projects to do!  My sister-in-law gave me this one; an old upholstered dining room chair that she uses at her desk now.  I don't know about you, but that dusty rose fabric just wasn't quite her cup of tea...or mine either for that matter!

Part I:  The Deconstruction

This one was pretty easy to start off, just ripping all that nasty pink fabric off with my trusty screwdriver and pliers.  I saved all the fabric from the back to use as pattern pieces, and the batting was also saved for re-use.

When I started ripping the fabric off the seat cushion, I discovered that this was apparently not the first time this chair has been reupholstered!  It had another layer of red-orange velvet underneath, even uglier than the pink!  Shocking, I know.

So that was promptly stripped off as well (don't worry, no more layers of fabric under that!), down to the seat cushion.

Part II:  The Reconstruction

I used those pieces of gross old fabric as my pattern pieces, leaving about an extra 1/2" all the way around so I'd be able to fold the fabric under and get clean edges on the chair.

I started with the back of the chair.  I stapled down the first back piece since that was going be covered up by another layer anyway, and you can't see the staples from the back.  Then I attached the batting and top layer of fabric, folding the edges under as I went and gluing them down with Tacky Glue.  Anyone who knows me knows that I use Tacky Glue for pretty much everything!  If you've never used it, try it now!!   It is so worth your investment!

Anyway, as I went along pulling the fabric tight and gluing it down, I started adding these decorative upholstery tacks that we got at Home Depot (for the entire chair I used about 1 1/2 boxes of the tacks).  You could do the tacks as a solid border all the way around instead of spacing them out, but you'd need 3 or 4 times as many.


The tacks were easy enough to hammer in, but I did have some that bent and ended up in the trash.  This was another reason why I glued the fabric instead of stapling it; I didn't want any exposed staples under the tacks.  The hardest part of this was probably going around the corners and still getting my folded edges to be clean.  But thank goodness for that glue!

When I did the seat, I started by pulling my fabric tight over the seat and stapling it in a couple places so it would stay tight.  The I just removed the staples as I went along gluing and adding the tacks.

And there it is!  All done!  Pretty simple and straightforward.  Comment below if you have any questions or comments and thanks for reading, everyone!!