One man's trash.....equals new chairs for me!

This week I have deemed "Chair" week! The next couple days I will share a few chairs that I have recently finished. This post has been a few months in the making...

In december after picking our son up from a friends house we saw these chairs on the side of the road...

...and because I have no shame when it comes to these types of things, I picked them up!

Our current table is a beautiful old table that has been in my brother-in-laws family for many years. They gave it to us and we fixed it up and re-upolstered the chairs that came with it. We love this table, but it only has 4 chairs and when guests come over we have to pull out the ugly card table chairs. Not so inviting! After seeing these two chairs on the side of the road I decided they were going to be our *new* guest chairs.

First things first...reupolster! I found a fabric I loved that was on sale for $6 a yard and got foam 50% off(I love me some deals!). We have our staple gun to staple the fabric in place, pliers to pull the staples out of the old cushion, and a serated knife to cut the foam.

We realized there were TWO layers of upolstery to remove and A LOT of staples! We also discovered that these chairs were so old the they were stuffed with actual cotton, not foam. We ended up needing to cut  new seats to upolster to because the original ones were cracking.

Next I sanded the chairs down to remove the original finish. We had to completely rebuild one of the chairs with screws, wood glue, etc...because it was falling apart. I chose a dark tan to paint them because I didn't want a dark brown (It would look fake next to our dark brown stained chairs). The outcome?

Steril. Something that looked like it belonged in my doctor's office. Blah.....

So, I tried a technique of rubbing a dark stain into the deep wood grains of the wood (On top of the paint we already had on them) to give them a darker color and "texture".

The result? GREAT! But, it didn't "fit" in our house....

Sooooo back to the drawing board again.

Step 5,301) Sand down again!

The next color I decided to try was a dark hunter green.

The result? Too blue.....

SOOOOO I tried the stain technique again, but this time on top of the hunter green.

The result?! Well, they are less blue at least..."They are fine, I'm tired of redoing these chairs, so I'm just going to say uncle and decided to "love" the color and go with it."

We screwed the seats into place and they were finished!

I am SO glad they are done AND now we won't need to pull out card table chairs when we have guests :)

  

Check back tomorrow to see the "Off yer' rocker" project!