Office Chair redo

We live in a college town and one of the great things about that is you can always find free furniture on every corner. This chair I found on our front porch when the apartment upstairs was being renovated and I saved it from the trash planning to fix it up and use it at my sewing table.

To refurnish your own chair you will first want to detach the cushions in order to recover. Since my chair was made out of a slick vinyl we decided to also remove the old material before adding the new home decor weight material I bought at JoAnns for less than $5. Usually I would just recover the cushions right on top of the old material.

Now, using a staple gun attach your new pretty material to one side and then the other.

Now do a corner by folding down your material on top of each other until you get a nice crease. After finishing your first corner, you will then staple down the loose side of material coming out from the finished corner. Continue to finish off the other corners and additional loose side.

Trim off excess material and at this point we reattached a square, screen-like material that came off the original chair. You could leave yours open or add a square of fabric to make it more professional looking.

The top cushion of our chair was nontraditional and made completely from metal. So no chance of stapling fabric into place. We copied the existing system and poked our material through these metal grippers and then pushed the grippers down flat all the way around.

The bottom edge I hotglued into place and then cut out a piece of material to cover the exposed back which I simply ironed under and hotglued down.

Now check your work and get ready to spray paint.

I used a shiny cherry red from Walmart for $3.47 and covered the entire metal frame.

Once dry, all that is left is to screw the cushions into place and pat yourself on the back. A cute "new" chair for less than $10.

And my favorite part? This little detail I didn't even originally realize was back here. It is a plaque indicating that this chair used to live in the library at the local university.