Stella Lane Designs: Shabby Chic chair redo--- EASY VERSION

Bre here.

I have been working with a client the past week and a half and oh man. Designing is exhausting. And on top of it, I have been doing all of the grunt work (remind me to never do the grunt work again) Like, I repainted the entire room on my own which in itself took 2 whole back-breaking, up-and-down-the-ladder, bending-over-for-what-feels-like-forever, days. I finally finished, turned around and realized I had to paint the closets. $#*@!!!!! So, 2 and a half more days later, I officially finished painting. (I had never painted an entire room by myself before and oh man. I would get home at night and just lay on the couch as my entire body ached.) But in the process of this, I needed a bit more seating. I spent every day stopping into thrift stores and scouring the clearance section of tjmaxx and one day I found this chair:

Ugly, right? Don't worry. This picture doesn't even do it justice.

It was absolutely filthy and just all around gross.

So I pulled it apart like I did with this chair last summer.

Luckily, this chair was not as stapled together as the last one so it only took a little effort to pull it apart. Make sure to be careful to keep all of your fabric as in tact as possible so that you can use the pieces later on for patterns. (I'll explain more later on... keep reading.)

I gave this chair a good wipe down because it was really dusty and grimy.

I have a bit of a confession. I spray painted this chair. I have never spray painted furniture that really mattered before but the style of the room is shabby chic so I knew it would work if it wasn't perfect since I would be sanding and distressing. I used an ivory colored spray paint and it took about 2 cans to give the chair a good, solid coat.

Notice the drips? It didn't even matter later on because I sanded them all off. Shabby chic isn't my personal style, but man is it easy to do!

I then used a mixture of fine-grit and medium-grit sand paper to rough up all of the edges and smooth out the drips. Make sure you really focus on the areas that would naturally get more wear and tear (the arms, top back edge, front of the legs, any areas that protrude, etc.)

Once you're all sanded and smoothed, you're ready to distress. I used a dark walnut stain for this and just wiped it on, and used a paper towel to wipe it off. It will naturally darken and stain the ivory paint and make it perfectly distressed.

Now you are ready for the recovering.

Lay out your old chair covers on top of your new fabric. I chose a light oatmeal linen fabric. This is where it is important that you left your fabric in tact while removing it. Cut around in the shape of your old fabric as close as possible (Leave more room than less room. You can always cut fabric off!) Do this with all your pieces of chair.

My chair was tufted and the foam was still in really good shape so I decided to tuft my chair. I cut circles out in the new fabric. I made sure to cut enough that it would wrap around the buttons. My buttons wouldn't come apart and I was doing this for as cheap as possible so I decided to just hot glue the fabric onto the old buttons. I figured once it was all pulled tight, it would be held on even better.

Add a flat dab of hot glue on the top of your button.

Place the fabric circle in the center of your button. Add hot glue all around the edge and start folding in. I should have gotten a better picture of the folding process. But it was pretty simple. Just try to keep it as smooth and flat on the front as possible. Don't fold in 4 big pieces or you will have a squared button. Just push small pieces inward until it is all wrapped in (does that even make sense?)

Next you will place the fabric on top of your foam piece. Make sure it is nice and centered and then start re-poking your buttons through the existing holes in the foam (making new holes in your new fabric) Then your chair is ready to assemble exactly like you un-assembled it just in reverse. Again, refer to this chair if you need a refresher or a good explanation. I'm sorry, I'm so terrible at taking pictures during the process. I just get so into it and the next thing I know, I'm done. This chair required no sewing, because there was no piping around the cushion.

PS, try and re-use as much as you can. There was piping around the seat back and between the cushion and chair base and I just cut the piping out of the old fabric and hot glued new fabric to it. I only did that because I didn't have a sewing machine and it was going to be hot glued to the chair in place so I knew it would hold just fine. But I wouldn't recommend that because it was not only time consuming but burned my fingers lots.