Road-side chair make-over

Remember the chair I picked up for free on the side of the road?

Yah, that one.

Well it got a make-over this week.

I have always wanted to learn how to reupholster a chair....a big chair. And then I had this chair sitting in my room, that was FREE. There was no better opportunity for an experiment, because I couldn't go wrong. If it turned out, awesome. If it didn't...oh well, it was free!

So of course I did a lot of research online before starting this project. I found lots of different tutorials, thanks to Pinterest. The only problem was, I didn't want to do any sewing. My sewing machine is broken, and Im not buying another one any time soon. And it would have taken me so much longer if I had chosen to sew. Now the chair I have, was put together with LOTS of sewing. unfortunately I didn't find many sites that could help me with that, but I got creative on my own. I think it turned out pretty good for my first attempt.

Heres the process I went through to get to the end result.

Start by taking all the fabric layers off the chair. This is a very long and hard process. There are literally hundreds of staples you will be pulling out. This took me about 4 hours to peel apart the chair (I use the word peel because a chair is put together like an onion. Many, many layers).

I labeled EVERYTHING as I was taking it apart so I would remember how to put it back together. I labeled the fabric, as well as the wood where the fabric was stapled too.

I kept whatever I could from the chair. You would be surprised how a chair is put together. But I kept everything, the cardboard and all.  

There may be surprises waiting for you inside the chair. On my last layer, I spotted a sealed plastic bag. Inside of it was a brand new jersey. Super weird.

When I was finished taking the layers off the chair, it looked like this.

I used the old fabric to trace out my new fabric. Since this was my first chair and it was more of an experiment, I decided to get some cheap fabric from Ikea. I used 7 meters for the whole chair at $5.99/meter. 

One mistake I made was not leaving extra room when tracing around the new fabric. Lesson learned for next time.

Then it was time to staple the new fabric on. This part was really fun. Its a lot of tucking, and pulling, and again hundreds of staples. Since my fabric was stripes, I decided it would be easiest to do horizontal lines on the back and seat of the chair, and vertical lines on the arms. Other wise it would have been nearly impossible to line up the fabric perfectly..a task I was not willing to take on during my first big upholstery project.

So this is the back of the chair. All the fabric gets put over the front of the chair, and then gets tucked and pulled to the back where it is stapled. 

Everything gets stapled to the back of the chair, which is then covered up using fabric and metal tack strips. 

back of chair

The arms were the hardest part to do without sewing. Again, I couldn't find any help on the internet, so I had to wing it.

I stapled the fabric around the front of the arm. Then I cut out a piece of cardboard that would cover up the staples. I put nails through the cardboard first, then covered up the other side of the cardboard. Then I hammered the cardboard piece in right over top of the other fabric. Like this:

Are you ready for the end result?

Ta-daaaa! Isn't she a beauty? It was about six hours of hard work, but the end result was worth it. I did learn a lot throughout the whole process. I made a few mistakes, and the chair is far from perfect, but it was a good learning experience. Im excited to try this again with other chairs I find....I can only get better each time I do it. And the total cost of the chair...$42. Not bad eh!