Refinished ReStore Chairs

I made the final push and got the chairs I purchased for $100 from the ReStore refinished!  I think they turned out really great, and I learned a bit along the way.  Here’s what I did:

I took the ucky bad vinyl seats off and gave all the chairs a light sanding all over with a power mouse sander.

I used Rust-Oleun Ultra Cover primer, and then gave them two light coats of Rust-Oleum heirloom white.  I really like how this white looks – very light and creamy, not at all stark.

Then I used Minwax jacobean stain to shabbify them a bit.  Here’s where the learning came into play – it’s a lot easier to apply the stain and wipe it off with the look I was going for if I misted the working surface with a light spray of water.  Our “bad doggie” sprayer worked perfectly for this, and a put it to a much more pleasant use.

The last steps on the refinishing were two coats of Minwax wipe-on polyurethane with a light rubbing of steel wool in between.

The seat bottoms were cracked and couldn’t be recovered, so I bought some 5/8″ plywood and used one of the old seats as a template to cut four new ones.

I used 1″ foam from JoAnn’s, some cotton batting from my quilting stash and my home decor fabric also purchased at JoAnn’s to recover them.  I used kitchen shears to cut the foam to the same shape as the seat.  Then I made a little seat sandwich with the fabric right-side down, then the batting, foam, and lastly the chair bottom.  I wrapped the fabric around to the back of the bottom and used a staple gun to secure it all around the edges.  I found it worked best to sort of smush the seat bottom down at an angle to get the fabric tight the way I wanted it.  I cut off all the extra fabric and batting and hammered in any loose staples.