A Kat in the City: French Country Chic Upcycled Chair

Today’s post is about a chair I found in a skip near my house. I know what your all thinking… “what on earth was she doing digging around in a skip?!” Well my friends, Skips are fantastic for free furniture. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that! So anyway, I wasn’t actually digging around in the skip. I was walking past and I saw the chair just sat there so I took it! Finders Keepers!

Here is a picture of the chair before it’s little makeover:

As you can see it was a little ugly and sad looking! My mum reckons it’s a 1920’s chair which is quite exciting.

I began by taking off the seat pad. You can do this easily by turning the chair on its side and banging on the bottom with a hammer until it just pops out! I then sanded the chair down to take off as much of the old varnish as possible. You should be left with something like this:

I then began to paint the chair. I used some white wood paint that we already had knocking around from our decorating stint. I had to do 3 coats as the wood was quite dark so it kept showing through. I wanted it to all dry properly so I did one coat each night over 3 nights.

While this was drying I recovered my seat pad! Now I’m no furniture expert so this is by no means the correct way to do this but I still think it looks great and works fine.

This is the fabric I used:

I bought it from the Haberdashery department in John Lewis on Oxford Street. It was around £20 a metre so I bought half a metre which was more than enough.

I cut a square that was larger than the seat pad by around 5cm each side then lay this out on the table upside down. I then lay my seat pad also upside down right in the middle of the square of fabric.

For this next bit you should really use upholstery tacks but I couldn’t find any for love nor money in London so I used these bad boys instead:

They are 1.5cm long and still do a great job of pinning down the fabric but it just doesn’t look as neat on the underside. Who’s going to see that anyway!

I began to tack the fabric down, pulling it as taught as I could as I went. The corners are a bit tricky and involve a bit of folding and lots of nails to get it neat as you can see: