How I Refinished an Old Chair Quickly and Easily.

0 By Kim

These are two chairs that were leftover from my grandparent’s house. They are not the highest quality chairs out there, but I thought they are definitely worthy of a project! Basically I’m sure you can do something like this with any chairs you come across–estate & garage sales, Craigslist, second-hand stores..or your grandparents!

Supplies I used:

medium/fine grit sandpaper
screwdriver
canvas upholstery fabric
tape measure
staple gun
fabric scissors
Fray-Check
Rust-Oleum Painter’s Touch spray paint Paint + Primer (this stuff is the best)

Here’s what i did:

Here is the picture of what the chairs looked like before:

I unscrewed the seats from the chairs. Luckily this step was super easy to do because of the design of these chairs.

I then took the sandpaper and sanded down both chairs to take off some of the finish and to help the paint to stick.

The quality of this photo is so bad! Not a good thing coming from a photographer huh? I don’t usually pull out my nice cameras for my DIY projects, my phone does a pretty good job to get the point across. But then you end up with this sometimes….anyways this photo is me taking the screwdriver to pull up all staples out of the seats so I can take off the old fabric and re-upholster them.

This is the spray paint that I used to spray paint the chairs after I wiped them down with a damp rag to get off any residue from sanding them down.

I spray painted both chairs. I did 2 coats. Here is how they looked after painting:

After I took the staples out, this is what the seats looked like. I just left this base fabric on. I’m actually not sure if they were already re-upholstered over this original fabric!

I put the old seat fabric on top of the new fabric I purchased to cut out the new fabric to the correct size. I measured the seats before I purchased the new fabric just to get an idea of how much I needed. I didn’t need much–less than a yard–so I only paid around $10 for the new fabric. And $4 for the spray paint equals a total cost of only around $15!! I already had a staple gun and staples, though.

Here I am cutting out the new fabric.

I took the staple gun and stretched the new fabric to fit around the seat, and stapled in place. It doesn’t need to be perfect on the bottom, since you can’t see this when it is on the chair.

All done stapling!

Some of the ends of the fabric looked like they were fraying a little bit, so I took my handy Fray-Check and put it on the frayed fabric. This will make sure it doesn’t continue to fray. You can buy this at any fabric/craft store.