New Life for Cheap Furniture-Easy Ways to Fix Up Old Furniture

Today I posted a new article -

New Life for Cheap Furniture-Easy Ways to Fix Up Old Furniture

Did I share with you our project this summer? We have a dining room set inherited from my husband's grandparents. It's falling apart, but I like it a lot, and we don't really want to buy new. So my husband hit on the idea of recovering the seats and backs with new fabric and refinishing the chairs. The fabric part went well. We found this great red damask with big chrysanthemums on it in Lynchburg at an upholstery fabric shop. It wasn't even that expensive. We took the seats and backs off the chairs, removed the badly stained and faded gold silk that was on them, and used the old fabric as patterns. A staple gun took care of the rest!

That finished, we set out to strip the varnish off the old chairs. That's when the trouble began. I don't know what in the world they used on these chairs but it was impossible to get it off. Plus we did not notice a whole bunch of carving on the legs and backs. Ugh. Talk about sanding! We both got sick from the paint stripping chemicals and sanding was such a pain in the neck that we gave up after one chair. We thought for a few days we'd have to buy new chairs, but how do you match 60 year old furniture to new chairs?

Then we were in Lowe's and John spied the paint aisle. He disappeared and appeared a few minutes later with a can of glossy black acrylic paint. At first I was not sold on the idea, so he said he would finish one chair and then if I liked it we would do the rest. We'd already ruined that chair with our botched refinishing job, so what the heck?

Well the chair came out great! I loved it. I am not a big fan of the English-Chinese Chippendale style, but the old Italian style set from Grandma and Grandpa suddenly looked....elegant. Like it belonged in a British drawing room somewhere. The chrysanthemum patterned fabric helped a lot by adding a bit of a Chinese flair, as did the combination of black glossy paint, which looked like lacquer, a popular furniture style.

Now before we set to work we did have an expert come and look at the set, and he agreed with our research; it wasn't worth anything at all. If it was a true antique or a rare antique, we would have left it alone. If it was even well made, we would have had the man who came to look at it do the refinishing work. But it's not. It's poorly made, inexpensive furniture my husband's grandparents bought around 1950 when they bought their home.

But I love it.

And now it has new life, thanks to my hubby's frugal chic mindset and creative problem solving.

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