Me and My partner have moved into our first house and as we are a little bit strapped for cash we have been busy free-cycling, scanning the charity shops and picking up things second hand.
The chair ready for the makeover
We found these horrid chairs on Ebay in need of a little loving and I liked the shape and the detail of the front legs we decided to buy two of them.
The first job is the great painstaking task of pulling off all the old fabric and staples. This will take you AGES! I tried a number of different techniques such as using a staple remover – this just broke – a flat head screwdriver, some pliers and a hammer. I tried to use the screwdriver to prise the staples out which worked for some, I also tried cutting the fabric around the staples before removing them however nothing I did was very effective. When you do finish this first task it was such a relief to throw away the old smelly fabric (I saved the fabric of one chair however to use as a template for recovering) and spray the chairs repeatedly with Febreze. And to wash my hands, and body.
Simon helping with the removal
The next painstaking task was to sand down the wood frame. This was made increasingly harder by the detail for which we had picked the chairs! Typical. I was lucky enough to have an electric sander handy to speed things up and soon enough the chairs were rid of all the dents, scratches and much and looking much better.
Chair after sanding
I then had to paint the chairs white. I wanted a kind of wishy washy effect where you can still see the wood grain, however I just used a tester pot so this wasnt that possible. What you want to do to get the correct effect is to water emulsion paint down until its more water than paint and then paint on a bit, and use a rag to wipe some of the paint off after it has dried a little. I did my best and also used some fine grade sandpaper to help bring out the wood grain.
Chair legs after being painted
The final stage is to add your new sprucy fabric. I chose a delightful spotty number. Now its time to get out the old fabric again and cut your pieces to size. Be very very careful as to where you cut your fabric and how far each cut goes and the last thing you want it to cut something too far (yes this did happen to me, some of the fabric also decided to rip a little further to be even more infuriating but i think i saved it). For the bevelling I recovered the old buttons with a circle of fabric and a glue gun, so long as the fabric is pulled taught around the front and secured around the back of the button the rest of the fabric will hide the rest. Then I just followed the piece I had cut off as I didn’t really know what I was doing and then we added extra folds as the fabric wasn’t pulled tight enough.
My biggest and most important tip is PULL!!! I cannot stress that enough. As I was doing two chairs I had some hindsight on the second one and realised that most of the fabric on the first chair is too loose, this means that after you have sat on it, its a little wrinkly, and the back isn’t very ridged as this is just down to the toughness of the fabric. So, Pull the fabric, then pull it a bit more, then staple it to the frame.
For the corner folds I just winged it a bit and secured it with some tape as I didn’t want to sew it before hand.
Almost Finished!
As I am not by any means a professional some parts of the finish – such as along the top and around the legs, were a little wobbly but the great thing is that armed with that trusty glue gun again I added upholstery thread to hide these parts….
Before
- After
And Tah-Dah. Just 6 days of work later I had two beautiful (if you don’t look at them for too long and start spotting their faults) chairs which cost just about £20 each. Lovely.
Bryoney Fawn 