Those Chairs... Again...

Remember way back when I was posting about these chairs below and my indecision on what fabric I wanted to use to recover them? Well... I finally have some news!

After a lot of time thinking about it, I finally found the fabric that I wanted for my office chair. The first step in the beautification process was to take the chair apart so that I could sand it down, prime and paint. Transformation, below...

Even with just a simple coat of primer, the chair was already looking better! Step 2 was painting, and I went with a semi-gloss white. After the first coat was applied, there was a long gap (approx. 1 month) before the second coat was done... and it was B that finally finished that up for me. He really is the best.

The seat itself was a little more work. It started out with this ugly, worn, dirty and stained reddish / orange tweed fabric. I took it upon myself to remove each of the staples, and felt incredibly lucky that there weren't that many.... that was, until I got the fabric off, only to find the ORIGINAL chair fabric underneath. UGH!

There were about a million staples in this disaster, and in my frustration, I vowed that I would never finish my office chair. That, of course, was all emotion, and soon enough I was back at it. B and I agreed we would leave the original fabric on, as it was almost worn down to the wood, and put our new padding on top. This is where we got inventive.

We had an old double sized IKEA cotton duvet laying around, that was once used in the guest room. It was pretty thin and, the perfect thing to use to pad my chair. We placed our seat on top of the duvet, that was folded twice, and then used scissors to cut it a little wider than the chair seat. 

Since the duvet was so thin, we knew we would have to use quite a few layers of batting to make a difference in the thickness of the seat. With everything cut, B held it all in place as I worked my way around the underside of the seat stapling. 

Thankfully, back in the spring, I had found a gorgeous sample of Robert Allen fabric for FREE, yes FREE! The best part is that it was the perfect size to fit my chair seat. I knew as soon as I saw it what it would one day be used for!

Blue floral was my fabric of choice

The last step was relatively easy, as we didn't have to cut a thing. Together, B and I pulled the fabric tightly around the seat, paying extra close attention to the corners. Once we were sure we got it where we wanted, we flipped it quickly to make sure we were happy with how it looked on top. I gave my okay and B held everything in place while I went staple crazy once again. So, without further ado, the final product....

 

For a simple project like painting and recovering a little chair, this took way longer than I had hoped. Thankfully it worked out well as we only just recently got to the point where the chair can officially reside in my "office space". Coming up tomorrow - a better reveal of the laundry room / office space where the little chair will now live! (The home tour photos were quite embarrassing...)