Before & After: Chair

Today a photographer came to my house to shoot some photos for an upcoming decorating issue in Link, our local arts newspaper. I found out about a day and a half before, and besides frantically cleaning and doing a little staging, I decided that I should makeover a chair that had been waiting in my garage.

Here is the chair before. It looks like someone had already tried to refurbish it, but made an unfortunate fabric choice for the seat cushion.

I removed the offending seat cushion, thoroughly cleaned the chair, sanded any rough spots , then wiped it down with a tack cloth to remove all dust. Next came the spray paint. I went with a glossy white, mainly because I want the chair to coordinate with a previous upholstery project. I did toy with the idea of dove gray or even black, but decided the white would best suit the chair's intended destination. While the spray paint was drying, I removed the old fabric from the seat cushion, cut my new fabric to size (an elegant gray-green velvet), and attached it to cushion base with my trusty staple gun. Spray paint now dry, it took just a second to screw the new cushion on. Almost done, but I still had those holes in the caning to deal with.

Note: I actually did take pictures of the whole process. But you know what? I don't feel like editing, resizing, and uploading all of them. This is the most basic type of re-upholstery, and there are a million of nicely photographed step-by-step tutorials online. Just Google one if you want to visualize it.

Ta-da! Here is the chair after. I ended up making fabric flowers to cover the caning holes, and I really like the look. They were very simple to make; I'll post a tutorial next week.

Update: Here is the fabric flower tutorial!

I used the chair to stage decorating tip #4: Use over-sized art to make a statement. I borrowed the large owl painting from Annie, don't you think it looks quite at home on my walls?

I'll post scans of the story when it's released, here's to hoping I didn't make any terribly weird faces.

Update: Here is the article!