Office Chair Makeover PLUS Bonus Paint Sneak Peek!

I know there's plenty of you reading this who think I have my act together in spite of posting true photos of what our house looks like most of the time.  I refuse to post photos of the home office Brent and I share together everyday in our rental home, and I will go only so far as to describe it.  It's actually probably listed as a formal dining room on the floor plan of this house, and it's wide open to the 2 story foyer, that, as you know really serves as my project workshop!  We each have a 6' long banquet table pressed up against opposite walls.  On mine, I usually have any number of paint brushes strewn about from the billion projects I have going on at any given time.  There's a pile of home decor related coupons and catalogs on one corner of my desk, and on the other corner there's an unfinished wood cottage style piece of bathroom furniture that was a temporary place to store our office supplies like pens, staplers, etc but it needed to move up on to the top of my table to elude the miniature sticky fingers in our house.  As it is, I have 4 calculators to my name because my two little calculator thieves like to hide them on me.  There's an end table from our old living room that houses an overflowing basket of tile samples, floor plans, paint swatches, fabrics, and a folder with important house documents.  A file cabinet, stacks of paperwork on the floor next to the file cabinet??  We have a couple storage bins jammed under Brent's table, but it's a rubbermaid mountain that constantly tempts the doodle to climb.  Did I mention there are enough wires to rival a corporate IT server room?


I sit on an accent chair from the clearance room at Ikea that I recovered as a decorative-only chair for my office at my last job.  Brent sits on a kitchen chair that was badly beat up during our move.  The chandelier over our heads has one of five light bulbs currently working.

Do you get where I'm going with this?

We both long for our new home office!  You've seen 2 new pieces for the office already - the peacock blue sofette and the giant gold armoire.  My latest project was reupholstering a vintage chair for my desk.  Brent and I both picked out chairs in a similar style from the chair boneyard at a used office furniture warehouse nearby.  Each chair was $10!  Aside from the bonus birdpoop on his, mine was a little more vintage than his, and needed a little more TLC.

Here's what they looked like originally.  Mine is the glorious beauty on the left.  :)

Originally, we were planning to reupholster the chairs in a rich lime green velvet, and I carried the sample around with me in my little bag of swatches everywhere I went.  After a short time, the velvet sample was really abused, and I decided it wasn't the right fabric for everyday use in our house.  Well, that, and I stumbled on this apple green leather at one of my favorite fabric stores in the DFW Metroplex and loved it immediately!  Mine came decked out in rusted nailhead trim.  I love the look but have had bad luck with installing nailhead myself so I decided to do double welt instead.  Groan - double welt is miserable on a lightweight fabric.  Don't get me started on double welt made with leather!

The other problem with mine is that there wasn't much to the seat foam, and there was NO back support whatsoever.  So I replaced the foam on the seat, and I bought a back posture pillow from Joann's and just stapled the straps right to the frame.  Here's what the pillow looks like - doesn't look like much in person either, but MAN, what a difference!  Oddly enough, the pillow was a pretty close match to the leather.  I could have just used the strap like a normal person, but nooooooooooooooooo.  Never the easy way!

Wishing I took more photos of the chair in progress.  Sorry!  I was really pleased with myself over the ingenious addition of the pillow.  :)

Here is my chair all finished.  It's not as bright in real life - the third picture is probably the most accurate color.  Also, the white paint is distressed and that's not coming through in the photos.  Perhaps it's not distressed enough!  I'll let the kids at it for an hour and it'll be ready to go.

Here are some of the complete office up-cycling projects.  The navy blue swatch is going to be the wall color. The only color missing at this point is the hardwood floors and the bold eggplant velvet curtains and the peacock vision will be complete.  Try to ignore the builder beige carpet and eggshell walls in our rental for the purpose of imaging the finished office.  :)

And for humoring me with reading about my silly chair projects, I'll now reward you with a couple house photos hot off the presses.  Mom and dad just got back from a visit.

MY CEILINGS ARE BLUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  SO MUCH DRAMA OVER THE PAINT WITH MY BUILDER AND FINALLY MY CEILINGS ARE BLUE!!!!!!!!!!!!!  YIPPEEEE!!!  Sorry for shouting, but you have NO idea what we went through to get them to paint these squares blue!  It's absurd, but it's done and I love them!!  Can't wait to see them in person.

We'll be at the house tomorrow staking out flatwork, like all the walkways, driveway etc.  They're also finally picking up our bathtub that's been in storage since we purchased it in August to pre-set it before the tile guys start sometime next week.  Lots of fun updates coming soon I hope!  Stay tuned.