The Big Peach Chair - Upholstery 301

I picked up this chair a few months ago after a brief craigslist search between packing and moving.  Hubs was so excited that I got another chair for him to move.  Ha!  Anyway, isn't this a potential beauty?  I mean, back in 1988 when peach upholstery and marble painted wood was trendy this sucker was probably the bees knees.  

Here it is (mostly finished) painted with light gray chalk paint, distressed, with a taupe upholstery .  

Now I get to take you through the steps to how I got it this way.  And I will tell you what I would do differently so if you try, you won't make the same time-consuming mistakes.  

First I ripped off the upholstery.  Note: You should leave the old upholstery on until after you strip the paint.  It will make clean up a whole lot easier.  Learn from my mistake.

Check out this marble looking peach and lavender paint!

Until now I had only sanded to get paint off of wood so I wanted to try stripping.  I bought this stripper (I laugh every time I say that) at a local store.  You can find it at any home improvement store/Walmart-type store. 

I brushed it on and waited the suggested time and the paint started bubbling, which meant it was ready to strip.

So I got the scraper and scraped and scraped.  Then I decided that stripping is not fun and it is time consuming.  Two things that don't make me happy when doing a project.  When I got this far, I realized I like the look of the scraped off paint.

This is where the chalk paint came in.  I made a batch using this recipe and you don't need to sand or strip before using it.  However, I sanded the chair so that it would be smooth (the majority of the peach marble paint was still on the chair and it was flaky from stripping -- another thing for you to avoid) and I painted one coat of the chalk paint onto the chair.  It covered it wonderfully!  When it dried I sanded it to get the distressed look.  If you do this you will want to paint a clear coat of polyurethane to protect the wood.

Upholstery:

I know this is a bad picture, but it's meant to show you that you should use the old upholstery to make a pattern for the new.  It is so much easier that way.  

 When the pieces are cut out, staple them on with a staple gun.

You can trim it to fit after you've stapled it.

I can't tell you exactly what to do because each chair is different.  For this one I had to sew the bottom and staple it on.  I also had to sew the cover for the cushion.  If you are already good at sewing, you probably know how to do this but if not, I have learned that pinning is very very helpful.  

The last step is piping.  You can buy it at fabric stores and it is really inexpensive.  Measure the piping to fit the chair and cut out strips of upholstery.  Sew the material around the piping.

Cut excess material.

Hot glue the piping around the edges of the upholstery.

And there you go.  You have an upholstered chair with awesome paint (I know I missed that bottom part but I'll get to it).

Linking up at the great Linky parties found at the bottom of the blog.  They are where I find most of my inspiration!  Check them out!

plus

Coastal Charm - Nifty Thrifty Tuesday

Savvy Southern Style - Wow Us Wednesday

Bunny Jeans Decor and More - The Bunny Hop

My Repurposed Life - Catch as Catch Can Party

2805 - Potpourri Friday

Debbiedoos - Newbie Party

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