A Chair to Keep and a Chair for Sale

Hi Friends! Jumping on to share a couple chair flips I had the opportunity to finish uplast week - the first being the beautiful mid-century chair from this post! I let my emotions get the best of me and ended up just recovering it in the end. I was really smitten with this piece and as Matt and I are in the middle of re-designing our living room to include a much larger work space, I wanted to hold onto this chair to use at the new desk area.

I used fabric from a large sofa pillow my sweet friend Shelly and her daughter Katie made a couple years ago. We no longer use the pillow on that sofa but the gray chambray fabric was still in great shape and a pretty compliment to the warm wood of the chair.

The centered inside-out seam was just a fun off-beat detail that doesn't take away from the classic look of the chair, you know, just for fun.

When I came across this next chair for less than $5 at the thrift store I scooped it up just to play around with. On a whim, I snagged a ball of yarn on sale at Michaels and this beautiful blue and white 'marbled' pattern fabric. Then the fun began!

After unscrewing the backrest from the chair, I used every inch of the yarn to wrap around the two wooden braces to create a new textured backrest - and it's SO comfortable!

A blue and white combo is classic but this pattern feels fresh and fun - I love finding ways to marry the two! There's always an opportunity to maintain the integrity of a piece while tweaking it just enough to make it modern. Finding that balance is my goal with just about every piece!

Wooden Accent Chair
$45
Contact me at chelsea@stylemutthome.com if interested in this cutie or a custom order like it!
(Imagine this beautiful backrest around an entire dining table!)
 

Thank you so much for stopping by today!

First Finds of the Year

Hi friends! Just popping by to share the fruit of a recent thrifting adventure I took with the kids near the end of their Christmas break! The best part was having the opportunity to get out and score some amazing pieces with my kids - we've been thrifting together for 5 years and I've missed doing this with them as they're all now in school! The low of the day was when a very kind old cashier at one thrift store pushed a box of styrofoam packing peanuts in front of my son, Mason, and told him they were edible and that he should eat one. He claimed that those packing peanuts were all he'd had for lunch that day and that they tasted exactly like popcorn. I don't know how old this box was but we're gracious people so we both took a teeny tiny bite, paid for our loot, found the twins and took an extra Airborne when we got home!

The same old man let each kid pick out a book to take home for free - well, 'free' after Mason and I took one for the team and partook of his styrofoam snack.

Let's move on to pretty pictures of less gross things! I decided to pull each piece in for some glamour 'before' shots. None of the pieces I found are in terrible shape and all the work needed is cosmetic. How about I share my plans for each one!

Petite Mid-Century Dresser

This cutie is on the small side at only 34" long and 32.25" high. The front drawers are marked up a bit so I would like to sand those down smooth and restain in a warm wood stain. I may paint his body white for a classic two tone finish that I think looks just smashing on mid-century pieces, and then sit the piece up on short tapered legs to add a few inches in height and get the body off the floor. However, I'm afraid that adding legs may look like he has 4 front legs, given that rounded detail on each side of the lower apron. Any thoughts on that?

Antique Wood and Wrought Iron Cabinet

This gem was a no-brainer when I saw it in the store despite the fact that I still have no complete plan for it! It's a sturdy piece with a hollow interior so it kind of just seemed like great blank slate. I'd like to disassemble the piece from the iron base, remove all the iron hardware and really clean up the wood. I'll sand the piece completely down and potentially leave the wood bare, (sealing it of course), with no stain, then reattach all the iron hardware and base. But that plan isn't set in stone...I may need to sleep on it a bit more.

Mid-Century Chair

Okay, don't laugh but sometime over the holidays I had a dream about a chair. Well, I don't know if the dream was actually about the chair, but there was a chair in my dream unlike anything I've ever seen and when I woke up I could still picture it so clearly! Since I'm not a skilled craftsman I know I have no business trying to build a chair from scratch, so I've been trying to find a chair in similar style to replicate my dream chair. This project will include recovering the seat in a deep blue chambray, (the easy part), and then removing the backrest and replacing it with tight vertical lengths of rope which will be padded half way up by 'tubes' of white or beige jersey fabric stuffed with batting and enclosed around each rope. Make sense? LOL! If only you knew how long it took me to compose that sentence - it's really hard to explain what I'm picturing! There's a very good chance this chair will look 10 times better now than after I try this idea, but it was a cheap find and mid-century or not...it was a cheap find. :) Bottom line, I have no emotional attachment to this chair I paid pocket change for so it's the perfect candidate to play around with.

Who am I kidding, I have a slight emotional attachment to this chair. Look at it! I may or may not be on the hunt for a different chair to try my idea on.

So that's what's in my garage right now and I'll be back to share each piece as it's finished! Thank you so much for stopping by today!

Reupholster a Chair ||Wrapping Up the 2016 Flip List||

Happy New Year StyleMutts!  Well, this may be a day (or two) late and an item short, but I'm wrapping up my 2016 Furniture Flip Bucket List!  Huzzah!  I don't know about you, but that's still a win in my book ;)

You may recall that I've been tackling these 7 items in no particular order:

Well my friends, I still have No.1 and No.2 to go and may-or-may-not-have completed one and a half of them.  Much like in 2015, the Baker's Rack has proved... problematic...  But fear not!  I still have some proof that I at least attempted it this year (that counts right?!?).  You'll have to decided whether or not a good ole' college try is admissible in New Year Resolutions court, but in the mean time there's still a fresh-faced new chair on the docket!

I have ALWAYS been interested in upholstery.  Primarily because I can't tell you how many times I see pieces with "good bones" but terrifying tapestry.  It seems so simple "just switch out the fabric and viola!" but there's nothing simple about reupholstery let me tell you.  To get it done right, you either need to pay an arm and a leg plus a foot and a toe or have a fairy fabric-mother.  And seeing as I have neither, I decided to challenge myself to try something a little more complicated than my Serape accent chair.  And it's no surprise that a project as intimidating as this one has been marinating on my Flip List for 12 months. 

I was very selective when choosing my test subject.  I wasn't ready for a "whale" of a project like a sofa or a chaise and a wingback armchair with it's flourishing angles would surely be a hot mess with my sewing skills.  So I cherry-picked a forgotten chair with clean lines (that's Cate for relatively fool proof) complete with frumpy maroon fabric straight out a dorm room.

Ok so this reveal is gonna go down a little like Project Runway: the opening silhouette may be simple but it's a classic color pallet. 

Now strike a pose...

And then turn on the runway so we can see the back...

Boom.  There it is!

The leather strap was actually was a Target belt in a former life.  For such a simple chair, I wanted it to have a little somethin' somethin'.

The chair disassembled into easy-to-recover panels.  I even left the two side pieces off so the chair could "breathe" (and also, let's be real, not trap as many crumbs). 

The fabric I chose was a heavy textured linen.  Also it's from a painter's dropcloth.

I simply wrapped each panel like a Christmas present complete with snuggly tucked in corners.

Now that I have a more complex reupholstery under my belt (pun so intended), maybe I'll have the courage to try (dare I say it)... piping.

Linen & Leather Chair
Now Available for Sale
Price $95

If you are interested in this piece, or a custom refinish like it, please email mcate@stylemutthome.com

Now, I know what you're thinking: Wait Cate!  What about the last item on your 2016 list?

Ahh yes, the very same delinquent baker's rack from 2015 that rolled over to 2016 with the caveat that I would attempted to build it out of reclaimed wood.  Well... let's just say I saved the best for last...

Or should I say the operative word was attempted...

Ha!  Ok so what I may have in amateur upholstery skills I certainly LACK in carpentry skills.  (Insert shameful grin emoji here) But at least this way we can go out with a bang (up job) and a laugh ;)

Here's to a complete(ish) 2016 and to posting a new 2017 Flip List in the coming weeks.  Stay classy friends.

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Let's Recap The Year: