Decorating on a Dime

Written by Kelly

One of my favorite interests is decorating my home.  I am constantly rearranging furniture or pouring over decorating magazines and Pinterest looking for ideas to use around our home.  It is a way for me to open up the creative part of myself and play around with my surroundings.  Sometimes my projects turn out successfully and sometimes I'm not so lucky.

Today I wanted to share with you one of my successful projects.  Earlier this fall my father-in-law built a beautiful farmhouse table for us.  We had been desiring to have space to host larger groups of people over for dinner.  At that time, our little four-seater Target table just wasn't cutting it anymore.  Now that I had this new larger dining table I needed chairs to seat people.  Thankfully, my mom's attic provided the perfect shopping venue for my budget!  Free chairs!  

I have always read that recovering dining chairs was super easy but I had never attempted it before.  So I was ready to tackle this new project.  

Before recovering I decided I also wanted to paint the chair itself to make it look more like my style.  

First I removed the seat cushions and wiped the chairs clean to prepare for priming.  

I used my favorite primer by Zinsser.  It's awesome! I highly recommend it!

After the primer dried I painted the chairs with two coats of glossy black paint.

I allowed the chairs to dry according to the directions on the paint can.  Then it was time for the fun part.  Recovering the cushions.

I followed this tutorial from Cottage & Vine.  I was floored when I read the blog post and saw that she was recovering my exact same chair!  It was meant to be!

The tutorial said you may or may not want to remove the old fabric.  I had a hard time getting it off so I opted to leave it on. At a table, lay the fabric face down with the seat cushion top down and centered on the fabric.  Cut the fabric so that 2-3" will wrap the back of the seat. Next, the fabric gets secured with staples every 2" or so inches. Begin in the center of one side and work your way to the end, then the other end.  Then start on the opposite side, pulling the fabric tight as you staple. Continue stapling each side all the way to the corner.

The final step is to staple the corners down and trim the excess fabric.

Once the fabric is on, reattach the seat cushion to the chair.

Voila!  A totally refreshed chair with a whole new look.