Quick and Easy Chair Make Over.

To date, the husband and I have bought less than a handful of the pieces of furniture currently residing in our home. The blue chair, our bed and two desks. I think that's pretty much it. Everything else was a hand-me-down. We are awfully thankful for all the hand me downs too, as they now work together to make our house functional - if not a little eclectic. 

We recently (as in the last year) inherited this desk chair from my mother. 

Not only is it old and lovely with rich dark wood, but it is in great shape. And most importantly, it means a chair for one of those two desks we actually spent money on. But the fabric, eesh! Can we say, out-of-date?

I am willing to bet my mother added that fabric to the chair some time ago, but I'll have to check in with her to know for sure. 

I had some of this fabric left over from another project. (The real color is a little more green than what you see here.)

Awesome chair with out-of-date look + left over upholstery fabric from previous project = Sunday afternoon make over. 

So, I got to work. First, I ripped off the old chord exposing gobs of dried on glue. Kitty took a very active role in this part. 

Then I ripped the fabric out with a pair of pliers. (I don't have photos for these next parts, for which I apologize, but hey, that just means we get to our favorite part, the after pictures, sooner!).  

Here's a tip from my last re-upholstery project which saved me a lot of time on this project. Whenever you reupholster something, save the fabric you are removing so that you can cut a duplicate. Your new piece of fabric should mimic your old fabric, depending on the project, this may require the use of an iron. This way you don't have any excess that you have to cut again, and more importantly, you do not accidently come up short, which would be a huge bummer. 

Once you have your new fabric ready to go, replace it on the furniture as you removed the old fabric. 

Now, staple it back on. Get as close to the edge as humanly possible, so that you don’t have to rip out any errant staples that might want to show themselves (like I did).

Now hot glue on your new corresponding chord. Be generous with the glue, but not too generous. You don’t want it showing up where it doesn’t belong.

Ta-da! New chair!

And the other side...

There are little flaws, like this corner where you can see the fabric...

But I am so happy with the improvement over all, that I really don't care.  

In the end, I spent less than $10 dollars on this upgrade. The only thing I needed to buy was the chord to go around the perimeter of fabric. (And if I ever bothered to measure anything before I started working on it,  I probably could have spent even less. But as it stands I have a little extra chord for a future project.)


I would love to hear about your reupholstery project - big or small. What did you learn? Do you have any tips to share?