Recovered Bar Stools

This is another project I completed quite some time ago and just haven’t taken the time to post about it.

I moved into a new apartment with a nice island in the kitchen that naturally needed bar stools. The only ones we could find were some that were rather ugly and gross. However, they had potential and weren’t expensive.

These stools were so bad that this is the only before picture I have of them. It’s not even a true before picture because I used it as a comparison after I’d already covered the first one.

I just cropped the finished one out so that you’ll think I had the forethought to take a before picture. Though all of that’s irrelevant since I just explained the secret…

Moving on.

There were four screws holding this piece to the chair frame. I removed those and found out that the stools had clearly been outside for a good long while. This one was the least dirty of the two as well.

Anyhow, I wanted to keep this black lining piece to put back on once I was done with replacing the cover. I carefully pried out the staples holding that in place and set it aside.

At this point I stopped taking pictures of what I was doing. The tan fabric was stapled to the wood with about a million staples. For the fist bit I tried pulling them out to keep the fabric piece intact so I could trace that onto the new fabric. However, that started to hurt my fingers, so I then switched to trying to cut the fabric off around the staples. This proved to be equally as difficult but more efficient than my previous method.

Eventually I got all of the fabric off and most of the staples taken out. At this point I’d inhaled more than the daily recommended amount of dust and lint (it’s probably zero), and I was only halfway through one stool.

I cut out a piece of fabric that was big enough to cover the circle.

I think I attached it with regular paper staples because I didn’t have any wood staples. It didn’t work very well, but that part didn’t need to hold that well.

I’m pretty sure I reinforced the whole thing with some hot glue as well.

I hot glued the black piece back on, dusty side down, and screwed it back onto the chair.

Just like that, one stool was completed.

I repeated the same process on the second bar stool except that it was way dirtier than the first one and for some reason just more difficult.

Then they were done. Amazingly, I lined up the stripes even though I wasn’t really thinking about that. I’m glad that happened, otherwise it would have annoyed me and I would have had to redo one of them.