Chalk Paint and Re-Upholstered Chair Makeover

This is the fifth day that it's been raining here in the Valley. We're really not used to this kind of weather and I think everyone's going a little stir-crazy. My own stir-craziness prompted me to revamp an ugly dining room chair left over from a yard sale I had over the summer. What was I supposed to do with a single chair? For the last few months it's been living underneath of a pile of junk in my basement. 

Well, after getting my new desk settled in my craft room, I realized that the hulking rolling chair that I used with my old desk was way too big. And thus began the great chair makeover.

Welcome to my dirty basement!

This was really a project of firsts. I've never worked with chalk paint, never made chalk paint, and I've never re-upholstered anything. I never really thought that I would.

First, I removed the chair pad by unscrewing the four screws on the bottom of the chair.

Which left me with this:

That's a layer of dirty, outdated fabric, a layer of rounded foam, and a final layer of square foam. I saved the old fabric to use as a template for my new polka dotted material.

Then I painted. I used the recipe for chalk paint that I found online from Lowe's: 

1/3 cup of cool water

1/3 cup of plaster of paris

1 cup latex paint

I used paint that had primer in it and I've read in a few different places that it's better to use paint WITHOUT primer, but it was just what I had on hand. Like I said, this was a stir-crazy, gotta-do-something-NOW kind of project, so I literally had everything I used for this project on hand. Was that the best way to do it? Probably not.

It took a solid 2 coats of paint and I still had to go back and do some touch-ups here and there. Not really sure how I feel about the homemade chalk paint, but I don't have anything to compare it to, either.

Then began the upholstering. I cut my new fabric, tossed the old, and very carefully laid it out on the old foam. Then I took my handy stapler and stapled it down all the way around. I found the corners to be a lot more challenging than I'd thought they would be. I sort of took the bunched-up approach. I pulled it as tight as I could across the front and then bunched it so that you can't see the bunching from the front. Then I stapled. Liberally.

Last, but not least, I figured I had to do something with the big blank space on the back of the chair. I thought about adding the initial of my last name but (with hopes that I'll one day get married), I decided on a big M instead.

I downloaded a cursive M from offline, printed it, and colored the back with a chalk pencil. To transfer the image, I taped it to the chair and traced over the lines on the paper with a pen, then removed the paper. The charcoal leaves a sort of "ghost" image behind and then I painted in the lines.

If you ever choose to do anything like this I STRONGLY suggest that you do NOT do it this way. It took FOREVER to hand-paint that letter. It looks pretty decent, but I didn't even have the right size paintbrush and ended up using a tooth pick to fill in the small lines with paint and at the end gave up and outlined the whole thing in black Sharpie to smooth the outer lines. (Remember: last minute project, here.) If you have the option of a stencil or a vinyl letter, definitely go that route.

All in all, though, I'm pretty much in love with my new chair. 

Love!!!