Home Improvement : $2 Chair Transformation

In November I was at a garage sale and found a chair for $2. I was really excited about it, as it had so much potential. My husband was mortified that I'd bring something that disgusting home. (for the record, it was very, very worn, but not as disgusting as it could have been; however, it was not allowed in the house) :)

We started by removing all of the cording.

The filling was pretty awful. We probably should've worn masks... This particular part wasn't too bad.

My husband spent hours removing hundreds and hundreds of staples. They were spaced out about every millimeter and were in a groove, so it was very hard to remove them. He eventually used a Dremel tool to clean out the grooves. At this point, it was ready for paint.

Several coats of white paint had it looking much better.

We kept all of the old pieces of fabric in case we needed the patterns for the new pieces. This is from the arm (yes, very nice old fabric--I'm sure you're wondering why we didn't use it!)

We did the arms first.

We then started stapling the fabric to the back. We got this far and decided that it needed to be ironed. Ironing right there was our only option. (this picture is pre-ironed)

I used an electric knife to cut the foam and stuck it in the back. I used 2" foam from Hobby Lobby and it seemed to fit well.

For the seat, I used 3" foam. I also wrapped some batting around it.

I decided that cutting the exact pattern from the old fabric wasn't great for this part as I needed some extra to allow enough fabric to staple into the groove. This was before I did any cutting on this piece!

This was prior to gluing on the cording. The hardest part of this was cutting the edges of the stapled fabric that were hanging out of the groove. I used little tiny scissors and carefully cut it so it wouldn't be seen once the cording was glued in there.

I'm sorry that I didn't get a picture of the next step. It was gluing the cording into the grooves. We used a hot glue gun and stuffed the cord in. At the ends of the cord, we used a lighter to glob it together so it would cut without fraying. Luckily it did not catch us on fire and it did firm up the cord quite well.

I haven't quite figured out where to put it yet. Here it is by the front door without a pillow.

And with a pillow....

Here it is in our bedroom, where it will probably stay.

So now my husband is impressed. He had been telling me that I was crazy to have bought the chair thinking we could redo it. (I figured we could, and if not, we were out $2!) I think it turned out beautifully! With the fabric, foam, and batting, I have about $35 in it.

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