Dressedtothe9's: Refinished Painted Chairs

I have these two chairs that were in my dining room. I removed them and just kept the 4 parsons chairs in the dining room in hopes that I would refresh the looks of these chairs at some point. They always looked nice at the ends of the table with the parsons chairs (2 on each side).
I have even thought of doing something with the table one of these days. I know some people think it is a horrible thing to paint wood but I actually like it. It brightens things up, lifts my spirits, makes me smile.
If you do a good job and don't have paint strokes all over and use the right tools it can look really good.
On this particular project I decided to use spray paint with a matte finish. I used Krylon Fusion as it didn't require much sanding before painting, I was able to get the colour I wanted and it wasn't too expensive. I needed 4 cans for good coverage. Two cans per chair.

Before

We removed the seats (attached with screws) and lightly sanded all surfaces, legs, rungs, tops, bottoms, inside, outside and then wiped the chairs with a damp cloth to remove sanding dust.

You can see in the first picture one of the chairs in the background has been painted the first coat by my husband. He did one chair and I did the other.

I think we ended up doing 3 coats and some touching up. The paint went on very well. Remember not to over spray as you will end up with drips. Make sweeping motions about 6 inches away from the surface putting paper under the chair to catch the over spray. Spray in an open well ventilated area.

The seats.

Remove any covering you may have had on the seat and staples, nails or whatever it was that held the fabric on. Place the seat face (top) down on your fabric and cut out a piece 5 to 6 inches larger all around than the seat itself to give yourself enough fabric to pull to the underside and staple with a heavy duty stapler. I used 1/4 inch staples. Cut out another piece for the second chair. If your fabric has a pattern you will want to make sure that the first piece you cut out lines up with the same pattern so each seat is the same.

Now that you have your seat face down on the fabric (remember to have the right side of the fabric the right way) pull the fabric and staple to the back of the seat on all four sides. Now staple in between those 4 spaces (you now have 8 staples) and so on in between each staple and keep pulling the fabric to make it evenly stretched over the seat and stapled on the back. On the corners gather and staple the fabric carefully so there are no folds on the right side. Trim the extra fabric ( I would normally staple anywhere from 1 to 3 inches from the edge on the back of the seat, this will leave some extra fabric that needs to be trimmed).

Here is a link illustrating the procedure slightly different but basically the same.

http://www.wikihow.com/Reupholster-a-Dining-Chair-Seat

Once your seat is finished you can screw it back in place and VOILA! Like new dining chairs and a whole new look.