Trash to Treasure, Part 2

What I started with for this project wasn't actually trash, it was a chair that Joe's grandparent's no longer wanted.  When we were visiting them last fall, we brought this beauty home with us since no one else wanted it.

My first thought was to paint it, but since the wood was in good condition I decided that it would be a good candidate for my first re-staining project.  My plan was to remove the old cushion and webbing that was the support for the seat.  Then I would strip the old stain, apply new stain, re-web the seat, get a new cushion and cover it.  The process started out pretty easy with ripping off all the old cushion.  There were about a million upholstery nails to remove, but I eventually got them all out.  Then I thought that I would just start sanding off the poly finish, but that wasn't working so well, so the project went on hold for a few months.  I knew that I needed to use some type of stain stripper, and that I would need to do that work in a well ventilated area, a.k.a. the garage, so I had to wait until the weather was warm enough.

Finally a couple weeks ago I dragged the chair into the garage and got to work.  The stain stripper was easy to use and seemed to do a nice job taking off the old finish and most of the reddish stain color.  Once I scraped off the stain, I waited (very impatiently) for the wood to dry, then I sanded it down to get it ready to be stained again.

The stain color I picked was called Jacobean.  It was pretty much the darkest brown I could find at Home Depot.  The only think that bothered me about it was how to pronounce the name, haha!  Is it JOCK-o-bean, or Ja-CO-be-an?  I just couldn't decide.  Anywho, I applied 2 or 3 coats of stain, I don't really remember.  Once the color was dark enough, I let the chair dry overnight before spraying on a couple coats of satin polyurethane.  

After the chair was all stained and polyed, it sat in my sewing room for about a week before any more work got done on it.  Then on a recent trip to Hobby Lobby I noticed that foam was on sale for 30% off so I picked some up.  Joe was in St. Louis for the Blues game this weekend so I spent my Saturday night and Sunday morning finishing the chair.  Getting the foam cut to size was fairly easy.  I used some newspaper to make a template of the seat and then cut out the foam.

Hey look, Pepsi is on sale :)

Not the best foam cutting job, but nothing that a little batting can't fix.

Next I covered the foam seat with batting.

The hardest part was making the final cover fabric actually look nice.  It took me 2 tries to get it to the point where I was happy with it.  The final step was nailing some upholstery nails.  Then on Tuesday night I decided to make a little pillow to put in the chair.  It just needed a little something.  Here's the final product!  It's sitting in our room on my side of the bed, with hopes of using it for reading.  Haha, who am I kidding, I don't really have time to read.  It will probably be covered in clothes in about a week.  Oh well.

Have a great weekend!