a peek into the archives: cane chair makeover

To celebrate EO’s 3rd Blogiversary we’re taking a peek back into the archives. There are lots of great posts and information in the archives so I thought I’d re-visit some this week. Enjoy!

It’s finally done. Thank goodness. Am I in love? No. Do I enjoy it for now in the room we have? Yes.

I started the cane chair makeover way back when…

It took me months to decide on a fabric and honestly, I don’t love the one we chose. I like it and it coordinates with the other colors in the room that we can’t change (like the walls) so it works for me.

After carefully taking apart the entire chair I was left with this:

The best way I found to redo the chair was to save every piece I removed and just replicate them with the new fabric. I did things like, use giant rubber bands to keep the fabric in place so that I could really see where the pattern was going to lay on the chair, before stapling it down.

While I worked on getting the fabric in place Al worked on painting the chair. I was going to buy new paint but then we decided to use some left over spray paint we had first to see how it looked. We used the rest of the oil rubbed bronze can we had and we actually loved it.

It’s tough to tell in this terrible night-time photo, but it gives the chair a little bit of a shimmer when the sun hits it which is fun instead of a plain flat black.

Once I had the fabric patterns where I wanted them, all lined up, I started stapling it into place. This is where my efforts stalled. My staple gun wasn’t heavy-duty enough. So Al grabbed one to borrow from his dad. But then the staples weren’t long enough. So we went and bought longer staples. But they still wouldn’t staple through the fabric and padding and piping. So I had to change up my plan of attack.

We ended up stapling everything we could, again we followed it completely to how it was when we took it apart, so all chairs will be different.

Once everything was secure, I actually hand sewed the piping on. There are about two spots where you can see some thread but really only if you’re looking for it. My fingers were raw and burning and it took me forever but I think it was worth it because it looked pretty good in the end.

The final result left me very happy with our work.

One last before and after:

The final cost breakdown was:

$6.99 for the chair, $12 for fabric and piping, $3 for staples. A total of $21.99 plus some tax.

Not too bad. What do you think?!