This winter I decided it was time to do a major overhaul to the lower level family room at ‘Our House’.
Part of that change was completely flipping around, from one side of the room to the other, the TV viewing area, which now left ½ of the room basically empty. In that empty part, I had plans for a game table and chairs, (and will be installing a wet-bar soon too… future posting alert!)
When I started shopping for game tables, I decided I liked the vintage ones better, so I focused my shopping on Craigslist…
The chairs needed to have casters for easy moving on the carpet. I wanted something that was a project, so I could inject my own personality into the finished look. And I didn’t want anything that was too big… or too small… but just the right size… I guess it was kind of like Goldilocks looking for a game table set… But I found it on Craigslist and it was perfect. After a treacherous drive to the other side of the cities (Minneapolis/St. Paul) on what started out to be good roads, but quickly turned bad, we scored this set…
Oh sorry, I, in my excitement to inject personality to the set, completely forgot to take a single picture of it before!
Imagine a 1980’s golden oak with brown vinyl seats… that’s it.
So just to keep this post from getting obnoxiously long, I’m going to concentrate on the chair re-do today and the table re-do next post.
This wonderful houndstooth fabric was my inspiration. I special ordered it from JoAnn Fabrics. It’s dark chocolate brown with a light cream. This is the perfect look for the seats, to accomplish my desired style in this space… sort of a ‘Pottery Barn meets Ralph Lauren meets a 1900’s boy’s club’.
Then I hemmed and hawed a lot trying to decide what color to do the chairs (and table as you’ll find out later) I was almost sure I was going to paint them a blue-ish color. One that would compliment my aqua accent for the room, like in the DIY canning jar chandy I made that actually hangs over this game table set. But, reminding myself that aqua blue in the accent, and should be 10% or less of the over all color of the room, and that I wanted most of this room to be very, very neutral, to play down the wallpaper I had decided to keep up, and black was one of those neutral color… so with all that being said… I painted the chairs black:
Ha, no I know this isn’t black, this is the primer coat. For the table, I recommend using a good bonding primer like this one so the paint will not easily scratch.
This is the black, in a nice satin finish. This Krylon spray paint covered very well and seems very durable thus far.
Then for some fun personality, I created oval shaped numbers on PowerPoint and printed them out on plain white paper, then with Mod Podge, applied them onto the inside backs of the chairs.
That way, in case anyone forgets which is their seat, hopefully the numbers will help them out a bit. Actually, I don’t know why I like numbers on things, but I do, and the chair backs seemed the perfect place for numbering.
And remember how I said the chairs must have casters? Well I added these handles on the back of each chair for pulling them out, and for a handsome little accent. (I had to special order these handles from Van Dyke’s because I couldn’t find any place that had the bin pulls with this style, so that the screw would really go into the back, and not have to come out from the front.)
Here’s my ‘new’ chair, full of personality.
I did a super quick recovering of the seats, no welting, just one easy seam in the two front corners and then folded and tucked around the curved back and glue gunned to hold it.
I now love the set… and I’m excited to show you the ‘personality’ the table has, you can read about it here… I really had to think hard to connect all the colors together for it.
Here are more furniture re-do projects:
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