New desks for the Girlies… now we need chairs!

A couple of years ago my wife and I made our own headboard by taking a large piece of wood and covering it with batting and fabric. I got to use my staple gun – yeah tools – and it was a pretty easy and straightforward project. We still have the headboard and it is still hanging in the exact spot we hung it. The great thing about projects like that is the idea that if we want to change the theme of the room or color scheme I can recover the headboard with relative ease and give the room some more pop. This is the idea behind our upcycled chairs.

We wanted to get mini-desks for our daughters to have in their room. This would be a place for them to work on school work, craft projects, reading a book or ??? We found what we were looking for pretty easily. Putting them together was relatively easy as well but now we needed chairs. We had two choices – #1 Buy new chairs X3 or #2 was to use folding chairs that we already had. Well buying three new chairs can get a little pricey and all of the ones we looked at were a little big for the space but the problem with using the folding chairs that we have is that they are B-O-R-I-N-G!

So we decided to upcycle them to make them more fitting for the space and allow the Girls to give them some personality.

Here is what we did, maybe you can come up with your own project based on this idea. We would love to hear about it if you do.

Purchased a can of spray paint for each chair – Each girl chose her own and we had to make sure that it would work on metal.
Purchased fabric to recover the fabric that is already on the chair – Each girl chose her own.
Removed the padding from the back and bottom of the chair. – The padding is typically a cardboard base with a cotton or batting wrapped in fabric and then attached to the chair. Our padding was attached with rivets so I had to use my circular cutting tool to remove the base of the rivet and then put it through with a tool.
Once the padding is removed “DO NOT REMOVE THE FABRIC” we covered right over top of it. This is much easier and give the fabric some rigidity.
Using a staple gun we affixed the new fabric and POOF it was done.
Next we gave the girls their can of paint, put them in the yard and let them spray their chairs. They had an absolute blast and the next time the grass is mowed the evidence will disappear.
Once the chairs were 100% dry, we waited a day or two and we glued the pads onto the chair. This was done in two steps so the chair could be laid down flat. Choose a glue that is rated for metal and fabric and try to stay away from something that foams a lot.

Now we have chairs that fit each of the personalities and look great in their rooms. If one of them “outgrow” the design we can just redo it.