Dining Room Chair Makeover

When we first bought Bright Little House we didn’t have any furniture, so anything anyone could give us was a BIG help. Fortunately our parents gave us a dining room table as a housewarming present. Unfortunately, we didn’t have any chairs. I don’t know if you know this, but chairs are ex-pennn-sive and our budget was F-R-E-E. So, we went yard sale-ing as soon as we could. We hit the jack pot and bought a grandma’s whole garage full of stuff for about $75.00. That included a sofa and love seat, two reclining wing-back chairs, 6 dining room chairs, 6 kitchen table chairs, a mid-century modern night stand, and a mid-century modern sofa table. The dining room chairs were a match for the table, but they weren’t a match for our taste and they really needed a makeover!

Thanks to Jo Ann Fabrics‘ coupon in the mail, we headed to get some new fabric for 20% off any purchase.

(Well, it was more like, I went to the mail box, saw the coupon, had a light bulb moment, and proceeded to plan till Adam got home from work; then begged tried to persuade Adam that it was what HE really wanted while jumping up and down with coupon in my sweaty fists.)

We knew we wanted to paint the chairs white and we weren’t sure yet on any particular color scheme for the house. So, we decided a neutral color that would go with any color would be the best decision.
Once we were there we headed to the Clearance section and pulled out anything that looked good, then we eliminated any fabrics that were too thin (which left us with all the higher priced ‘Home Decor‘ fabrics). We couldn’t decide on our favorite two fabrics. One was a tan linen and the other was a very pale grey (more like a grey-white). Since we were pretty sure we wanted to paint the walls grey we went with the light white-grey fabric. Turns out that the other fabric didn’t have enough yards for our project anyway, so the grey was a no-brainer in the end (once we got it home we saw that it actually almost matched the white-painted chairs. Which made a beautiful monochrome look; which we liked better than what we thought the grey would look like.)

Since the fabric was on clearance and we had a 20% discount thanks to our mail coupon, we were able to afford this little makeover. Yay!
So, with roll of fabric in hand we headed off to Home Depot to buy a few cans of High Gloss white spray paint. Which was free thanks to Adam’s gift card.
Thank you baby for spending it on me and my crazy spur of the moment ideas.

So, without further ado…

Here are BEFORE shots (from Halloween):

Alex Kitty

Here are shots of the cleaning process:

I used an old bucket filled with warm water, a drop of dish soap, as well as, a tiny sprinkle of OxiClean (for good measure). To scrub, I had old car cleaning brushes and I scrubbed the heck outta those chairs. ( I needed to be gentle around the rattan parts because they are delicate and warped a little when wet but they straightened back out when they dried)

Adam removed the old fabric from the seats and stretched and stapled the new fabric on.

There was three layers of old fabric under those chairs, the last one was lime green crushed velvet..it was pretty yuckie.

After painting white:

With re-upholstered fabric:

With the gold napkin rings:

The dining room is still in progress..we will paint the walls (again, that color was oops paint bought at Home Depot just in time for our Thanksgiving guests), buy a buffet table, rug, lamps, hang the mirror and some art, and well, we want to eventually get new carpet. We originally wanted wood floors, but since we will rent this house out in a few years while we’re away in college in another city, we decided carpet is the easiest to replace if the renters ruin the floor.

* The napkin rings are from Pier 1, the table-cloth were bought at Home Goods (the packaging said Badgley Mishka), the napkins are Target, the glasses are Wal-mart (water glasses) as well as the gravy bowl, and the dishes were bought at Goodwill, but they say Thomson Pottery on the bottoms.