You guys know us well enough to know we love the hunt of garage sales. You just never know what you may stumble upon when you are shopping and about 6 weeks ago while we were out and about we found “it”. What is “it”?
Well, to some of you it may be hideous but to us we knew in an instant it was a piece of furniture that with some TLC (OK, a lot of TLC) it would be perfect in our home. We walked over to the home and they had a $10 price tag on it. $10 is a good price for a chair, and this one was funky – but we also knew it was the last day of the sale, middle of the afternoon, and there was no way this woman wanted to lug this beast back down to the basement. Kelli offered her $5 and she was happy to let it go.
Here is what we are talking about:
Our $5 score!
We just knew that if we took it home, upholstered it and beefed up the supports underneath it would be perfect. Kelli had been wanting to start a new project of some sorts and this seemed to be ideal. So Jim carefully manuevered it into our vehicle that was already quite full (remember, we had been going to garage sales all morning).
We happened to stop by Kelli’s Mom’s house and showed her the chair. She mentioned she had a bolt of upholstery fabric she had not used and if we wanted it we could have it. It was an ugly olive green color which wouldn’t match our decor but Kelli figured she would be painting the chair anyway so it would be fine. The material was durable and that was important. When we got home we decided to try bleaching the fabric to make it as light as possible.
Luckily in our stockpile we had a few gallons of bleach, so we filled a tub outside and added bleach. We left the fabric in the bleach water for a bit and we were delighted to see that it had turned from ugly olive to yellow! Yellow! That is one of our favorite colors and works perfectly with our exiting decor.
Hooray for the color!
After it was done bleaching we tossed it in the washing machine to get rid of the bleach and hung it on the line to dry. I scrubbed the heck out of the chair with bleach cleaner (again, thank you stockpile) and a scrub brush. We decided instead of tearing off the existing vinyl we would upholster over it. After is was dry Jim hoisted it up on the work table in the garage and rounded up the staple gun and staples. I began to upholster it.
Once it was upholstered I knew I wanted to make it funky so I decided to paint it. Luckily Ace Hardware had their free pint of paint deal going that Saturday so we went and scored 4 free pints of bold colors (thanks to Mom and Dad too for going with us so that we could each get one!). Red, deep yellow, black and green were the colors of choice. We already had some white paint at home and in my craft paint stash I had purple, royal blue, orange and turquoise.
It took about a week to finish the painting. To hide the staples from the upholstery on the edge I used vintage buttons that I super glued on along the side. We had scored these buttons at an estate sale some time ago, so we did not have to spend any money on them either!
Jim worked on the underside of the chair, which was in overall decent shape. He reinforced it with new wood and glued the joints on the base. This is a rocker, so he also lubed up the springs on the mechanism.
And when it was done:
The vintage buttons worked perfectly to cover the staples.
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Groovy, you two are awesome. I love how you work together xo