Furniture Makeover – From Drab To Fab!

A furniture makeover is a great project to considering doing at home during these current times of self-isolation.

Online market places are full of budget friendly beautiful finds.  More often than not, these second-hand gems are in need of alittle TLC to make them their best again.

Or you may already have the perfect piece at home that’s in need of a little refresh.

Here we give an old timber chair (which we picked up from Gumtree for $20) abit of a face lift so you can see how easy it is to transform your perfect find from trash to treasure.

We did this outside, but still used an old sheet underneath just incase there were any spills during our furniture makeover.

Step 1

First of all we made sure that the chair was sturdy and any leg or arm wobbles were fixed up. Sometimes your old chair or piece of furniture may be dusty or covered in cobwebs, so it’s a good idea to give your item abit of a clean and/or wipe down.  We then popped out the seat pad and put it aside for later.

Step 2

Once our chair was nice and sturdy again (it did have abit of a leg wobble) we needed to prepare the surface for our paint. In order for the paint to have a nice rough surface to adhere to, using a fairly fine sandpaper, we lightly sanded the whole chair. Once we were happy with the surface we then gave the chair another wipe down, just to make sure there was no sanding dust sitting on the surface.

Step 3

Using a general water-based undercoat (after ensuring that it was suitable for our project) and a small brush, we painted one coat onto our chair. Once the chair was covered, we let the undercoat dry for approx 2 hours.  Then we gave it a very soft sand, just to smooth out any lumps and bumps followed by another wipe down.

 

Step 4

Next we needed to apply the first coat of paint using our cleaned brush.

It’s best not to hold too much paint in your brush at one time. Remembering to wipe the brush on the side of the pot each time you dip into the paint should ensure a nice coverage. Too much paint will cause runs and drips down your piece of furniture, but not enough paint will make it hard to apply and will leave a very rough looking finish.

After a couple of hours, the second coat was applied in the same way and then left to dry overnight.

Step 5

Now it was time for us to give the old seat pad a refresh too.

As you can see from our photos, we pulled out the big staples from the base of the pad. Once all the staples were out we could remove the old tattered leather that was covering it.  This left the padding and the structure underneath bare.

We then used that piece of leather as a guide for cutting out the correct shape in our new fabric.

Once we had that cut out, we could fix the fabric onto our pad using a staple gun.

The next morning we popped our newly re-upholstered seat pad back into our freshly painted (but dry) chair!

Our finished furniture makeover from a boring old brown chair to beautiful and fresh!

For inspiration and ideas on how to incorporate patterns and texture into your home, check out one of our other blogs here https://www.inspiredspaces.com.au/incorporating-patterns-texture-into-your-home/

For any interior design, renovating or decorating help, please contact the team of Inspired Spaces.