Another kind of crafty project

A couple of months ago we cleaned out my grandpa's apartment when he moved into a nursing home. In his closet I found these old chairs that used to be a part of my aunt and uncle's restaurant yeeeears ago. I really like the lines of the chair and decided rather than selling or donating them that I'd try to give them a new life.

Originally I was envisioning a silver chair with a cool fabric covering the nasty, old, red plastic-y seat. But when I got the chairs home I realized that I didn't really have a good spot in the house for them. Someone (maybe Willy?) suggested I put them out on our back deck instead. We'd been looking for a couple of chairs and a small table for that area anyway, so that was the new plan for their home.

But silver chairs wouldn't really work for an outdoor patio style, so I decided to paint them brown instead and find a colorful, canvas-y fabric for outdoors. After removing the cushion (it was held from underneath with a few brackets that were easy to spin out of place and release the seat), I sanded everything down. That took a loooooong time, several hours for the first one and then I got lazy with the second one and only spent half as long on it :P. I really didn't need to sand it as much as I did since I wasn't planning on staining it but I just got tunnel vision I think. Certainly didn't hurt the chair, just my tired fingers and legs!

Given my current employment situation I didn't want to spend a lot of money so I got creative in acquiring the paint and fabric supplies I needed. On one of my local Freecycle boards someone had posted about a free paint shed at a nearby town's recycling center; anyone can pick up free paint there. Cool, huh? So I found a small can of brown enamel paint there and even got a great tinted primer. The color turned out much more matte than I had originally envisioned, but did I mention it was FREE? So, yeah, I'm cool with it.

I also suck at painting. I started out trying to use a mini roller on the flattest parts and a brush on all the other sections but the roller wasn't very useful and I always seem to load it with too much paint. So after the first coat dried I had a bunch of drippy paint sections that I had to sand down again before putting on the second coat. I also missed a few spots during the first coat so, yeah, I suck at painting. Somehow I managed to work it out for the most part.

As for the seat, I hit the remnant bin at Joann's Fabrics and scored with a yard of summery-colored, striped, canvas-type fabric. Not only was it in the remnant bin, it was 50% off that day and one yard was more than enough for the two chairs I was working on. Total cost, about $4. Score!

I borrowed a staple gun from my family and started recovering the cushions. Can you see how the old red plastic was held down by individual little nails? They were tiny, like 1/8" long and some of them started to pop out as the staple gun fired. You can also see some of the nasty black, kinda greasy crap that was on the underside, probably from having been in a Chinese restaurant for all those years. My mom helped me with the first cushion and then I did the second one on my own.

I got the two chairs done just in time for Willy's BBQ birthday party so we put them out for a trial run. No one fell through the chair, got paint on them, or had any other disasters so I guess the job got done :) Here's the final product and a side-by-side before and after (or after and before?) comparison:

It was a fun project, and besides some elbow grease the only cost was the $4 for fabric. Can't really beat that!