Take a Chair, Claire

***updated to link up here! :)***



Take a seat, Pete.

Sit down, clown.

...wait - maybe I should stop while I'm ahead. Don't wanna offend anyone tryin out my rhymes yo.  :)

Yesterday I gave you a sneak peak at a before and after of the dining chairs that go with the craigslist table I snagged.

                             BEFORE                                                                       AFTER

Astute readers may have noticed that these are actually different chairs (the before has arms, the after doesn't). Maybe I meant to do that to see if ya'll were paying attention, and maybe it's because I had already painted both armless chairs and didn't have a 'before' option other than the arm chair once I finally remembered to break out my camera. If you've read any of my previous posts I think you know what the truth is  :)

So here's how the transformation went. I knew I wanted to re-cover the seats (they were a pretty neutral color, but there were a ton of spots and stains from the previous owner. This photo doesn't really show that, but trust me, they were there:

I had to remove the seats for easier painting of the frames anyway, so recovering them while they were off seemed easy enough to do.

I laid the chair down on its back, broke out my phillips head screwdriver...

...and from underneath, unscrewed the four screws near each leg, and then the seat came off in a snap!

See all that plastic under the seat? Yeeeaaaah, I guess that was from when the seat was new, but let. me. tell. you. It was nowhere near in new condition when I ripped it off the seats. GRO-DY! Then I had to pick off a few bits that were still stuck to the frame:

Then I sanded all over, wiped it all down, and broke out this!

And here's what it looked like after one coat:

Here's a shot of a chair after its third and final coat:

If you're attempting this at home and need to know how many cans of spraypaint to buy, this project took about one can per chair, plus half of one more which I used to hit any spots I missed here and there.

So 5 cans in all, at $2.99 a can (I got all my cans from JoAnn Fabrics at 40% off), for a total paint cost of $14.95, plus tax.

*(I also used two cans of spraypaint for the table, which I'll provide my cost breakdown for when I write that post after that project is complete)

While my chairs were drying, I went inside and began working on recovering the seats. That's where this came in:

I laid the canvas out underneath the seat (there's no real right or wrong side with drop cloth canvas, but if you were using a printed fabric, make sure you lay it with the print side down, facing away from you) and cut around it leaving an extra 2 inches or so for wiggle room. 

Then I stapled the center of one side...

Stretched the cloth tight, and stapled it in the center of the opposite side...

Then continued stapling down the sides, front and back of the seat.

This Powershot staple gun is from Lowe's and cost $20. It's also a brad nail gun. It's not an air gun or anything fancy, just a straight-up heavy duty stapler :)

You'll need to leave a little room to work with for folding the edges, so don't get staple happy and staple all the way up to the corners (lesson learned)  :) 

Take your fabric and fold one side down and in, while bringing the other side down over top of it. Does that make sense?

It's kind of like wraping a present, and you'll get a nice clean fold like this:

Then staple the crap out of the corner so it's re-enforced and the staples have a strong hold :) Do this for the remaining three corners, and make sure all your folds face the same direction.

Then flip it over and admire your work! :)

So with the chairs dried and your seats recovered, the next step is to put the seats back on the chairs.

I laid the chair down again (does something about that angle of the chair above feel wrong to you? It does to me, haha) and placed the seat back on top.

Then I took my screws and used my screwdriver to screw them back into the existing holes (wow, that sentence had the word 'screw' in it A LOT) and....

VOILLA! 

A purty seat seat cushion on a purty chair :)

Wow, what a difference from this, right?!

The canvas cost $15 from Lowe's (and I have MORE than half of it left over for future projects) so the total project cost for all four chairs came to just under $30, at $29.95 before tax ($49.95 if you're also buying the nail gun, but that is a one time, upfront cost, and the staples are under $3.00 a pack).

A 30-dollar makeover for four beautiful, curvy and sturdy chairs? YES PLEASE! :)

I still plan on distressing and glazing to bring out some of the details (like in the photo above and below) in the lines of the chair.

*sigh*...I likey :)

 I'm not so good at it yet, but here's my attempt at 'staging', haha :)

In hindsight, I probably should've used a cute pillow or something in place of the lunch box...oh well  :/

So, anyone have a set of chairs they've recently re-vamped? Anyone motivated to try it now? Don't be afraid if you're thinking about it - it's easy peazy pizza pie!

Thanks for stopping by and Happy Hump Day all! What? Get your mind out of the gutter...hump day as in Wednesday, as in over the hump, as in halway through the week...sheesh :)

~Amy

Linking up! :)