Office Chair Revamp



Hey y'all!!! I'm so sorry for the long hiatus. Things just got super crazy all of a sudden, lots of life changes and all but thankfully I'm beginning to acclimatize. So hopefully, I should get more regular with my posts. I have a couple lined up already.

Do any of you have those black office ergonomic swivel chairs that are so blah (for lack of a better expression)? I have one I used in my 'under construction' craft room which just stood out like a sore thumb and I decided to do something about it.

So I started out with this........



And ended up with this...okay my chair lost tyres in an unknown battle. I would get round to replacing them someday.lol

What you need;
  • Chair
  • Sand paper or a sponge with an abrasive surface
  • Spray paint; white as a base then the colour you want your chair to be
  • Fabric; I needed only one yard
  • Acrylic sealant (optional)
  • Glue gun
  • Staple gun ( depending on the make up of your chair)
Okay let's get started.

I took the chair outside and placed a garbage bag beneath. You can use a newspaper. Just anything to keep the floor stains minimal. Next, I used a dust rag to give the chair a good wiping to remove oils and dust. Then I spray painted the chair with the white paint. 
Now I need to give a little lecture...
 Most of the body of the chair is plastic and the legs are metal. The metal part sprays like a charm but you need a little more effort on the plastic side. The arms of my chair have a rough surface to give a better grip, so if I needed the paint to be flawless, I should have sand papered the arms to smooth them out before applying the paint. But, I didn't have any on hand so I tried to use the scouring side of a dish sponge instead. It didn't do much and took up energy but it was better than nothing. After the coat of white spray paint, I let it dry then use the sponge to scour the surface again.



Then I applied the gold spray paint. While I was doing mine, the clouds suddenly opened up on me and started pouring vengeful rain. It wasn't the least bit funny because it messed up my paint job. I had to carry the chair into the shaded area before the paint dried coupled with rain droplets falling on the chair, my first coat just came off in clumps. Talk about annoying! But I wasn't about to be deterred.I don't have any pictures of this step as a result.After the rain stopped, I applied a second coat of spray paint. The legs and stem of the chair were fine but the arms( which I used to carry the chair in) were damaged but I could have fixed them if I had sand paper to take off all the paint and start afresh. So I went to plan B, as you would see later. At this point, if you have acrylic sealant, you can coat the painted surfaces with it to minimize scuffing. 



For the next step which is reupholstering the chair, I cut fabric to size the seat and back of the chair leaving about 2 inches allowance all round. Another little lecture; My chair as I discovered during this project is the really cheap kind. Most of the good chairs have a place you can unscrew the back and seat of the chair and lift out the foam with a wood backing beneath it. If your chair is this good kind, when you've disassembled the chair that way, you can simply drape your fabric over the chair and staple the edges to the wood backing beneath. I tried to do that but my chair backing is plastic and has no place for that kind of disassembly. It simply has a rubber bias like binding where all the edges are tucked into. As a result, all I could do was use a flat tool (in my case, a flat topped screw driver) to tuck the edges of the fabric into the binding as you can see above. And then my chair was mostly done!


You can see the peeled of paint that the rain and my hands caused. I contemplated waiting till the next day to get sandpaper but my next day was full. Then I thought to myself; why not cover the arms with fabric too?? At this point, I was ready to sleep so again, no pictures. I cut fabric strips to fit all around the arms and the glued the in place underneath. That simple! If you want your arms padded, you can simply place some foam on the arms before wrapping the fabric around it.



Ta da!!! All done. I looove my new chair!


Fits in better with the room now. That tire shall be replaced at an unspecified date...maybe.
What do you think? Try it out? Let me know if you do.
Thanks for stopping by.X

CONVERSATION

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