Double the Fun

I've been looking for months for the perfect accent chairs for the office. The white chair just wasn't cutting it for me camping out in the corner of my black and green office, and I wanted a seating area, not one chair. So the white chair headed upstairs (more on that later).


I had been scouring Craigslist with little luck. I wanted something with classic appeal - something worthy of HW Home - for not a lot of money.

All of these fabulously classic chairs from HW Home.

And then I came across a posting for two barrel shaped cane back chairs. I dragged Mr. B with me to look at them. Not because I wanted his approval - that's not how this marriage works, friends - but because I'd let my car registration expire and wasn't willing to risk another ticket 5 days after getting caught zipping through Boulder. I realized later that just because the registration on my car is up doesn't mean that I can't drive another car and I could have just taken B's car. Sometimes I'm not the sharpest crayon in the box. Only sometimes. Oh wait, were we talking about chairs? Sorry.

So Mr. B and I headed to a sketchy part of West Denver. Mr. B did not see how the chairs could be anything but hideous, but he wasn't along for approval (although I did ask his opinion on the comfort of the chairs since he was along for the ride. I know, I'm so giving). After realizing we were loading them into the car no matter what, Mr. B bartered the guy down from $50 for both chairs to $40. He's good at that. I'm not.


I got them home and immediately removed the seats so I could paint the chairs. Foam brushes are my new FAVORITE tool for painting furniture. And with a quart of free black Glidden paint on hand from their paint giveaway in July, I got started right away.

The next day I ventured to the fabric store - with either my signature chartreuse or a black geometric print in mind. And I fell in love with the Houndstooth. They also had it in chartreuse, but I figured I'd go classic with black.


Now, I'm not going to be one of those bloggers that acts like they invented recovering the seat of a chair with a staple gun. My mom taught me this trick when I was in utero, and you know she learned it somewhere. I guess the beauty of blogging is that you can pretend you invented an age old trick, but that's not going to happen here. If you want to change how your chair cushions look, unscrew the cushion, pull out the old staples (proof that stapling fabric to seats is not a new fangled upholstery trick), remove the old fabric and staple the new on in its place.

Done.

I love these chairs. They fit the window perfectly, I love the rounded barrel shape and the airiness of the cane back, and I love that I bought two chairs and painted and recovered them for a total of $50. What do you think? And please excuse the beige chest of drawers in the photo above, they're a work in progress as we try to move our imperfect cottage away from TV trays as side tables.