I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on completing my office.  I With the move, I got a 10 x 12 room to decorate and use for my own purposes.  I had furnishings –  my desk, craft table, and reading chair.  I knew I wanted a book case to hold some of the books that I refuse to get rid of and for future reading material and a table for my sewing machine.  The rest of the décor I had/have no idea about.  I‘m getting things as I see them or find that I have a need for it. 

One of the things that has been bugging me has been my desk chair.  I had been using the chair that my neighbor had put out at the curb on trash day a couple of years ago that I refinished and my husband had reupholstered.  The problem with it was that it is dark brown and gold.  A great color when I had a dark brown desk, but it didn’t go with the current colors I was working with – black, gray and shades of blue.  The other issue was the style of chair.  I had many style loves – ones that I had seen in magazines, online, etc.   I finally decided on a Parson chair (I definitively decided this last week).  The problem was I wasn’t finding what I wanted in color or texture.  I figured I may have to find something and do some work on it to get it where I wanted it.  On a whim I stopped at the Goodwill on my  home from work and Eureka!…there was a chair for $7.  There were two actually but one was not so sturdy so she stayed in the store and I took the strong boy home with me.  (Excuse the clutter of my office, I was going for a before picture, not a cover shot.)

I didn’t want to have another unfinished project in my home for a long amount of time so I resolved myself to get the job done on my Monday off.  I spent 3 hours in JoAnn’s looking for the perfect fabric.  I came out with fabric for my desk chair and my reading chair that really needs to work (I’ll talk about that in a later post.).  I had spent the previous day researching the best way to reupholster a Parson chair and after several videos and tutorials felt pretty confident that I could get-r-done in a day. 

Because I have recently become addicted to Houzz.com where I had “liked” a two-toned office chair; I had decided to cover my chair in two fabric patterns. 

The first thing I did was remove all of the pieces.  It took over two hours to remove staples and fabric – most of this time was spent on removing the staples.  OMG, there were a lot of staples.

After I got all of the pieces off, I took the pieces and used them as a pattern to cut out the replacement pieces.

Next I took some batting that I already had in my supply closet and placed over the cushion of the seat.

 

Then it was time to put her back together.  I took the fabric for the seat and placed it on the seat and fished it through the back cushion  to the back of the chair and start stapling.

I did the same for the front part of the back of the chair.  I had to put slits at the bottom so that I could slide it through the hole and allow me to wrap around the sides without a lot of puckering.

 

I made sure that everything was positioned correctly and began stapling from the top of the chair back to ensure that I had enough fabric up top and to make sure that the pleating was the neatest.

Then I stapled around the bottom. 

Because I wanted the chair to be two-toned, the back of the chair turned out to be a little more difficult.  I didn’t want staples to be seen on the back and I wasn’t going to be putting any trim work to camouflage staples.  Once I had the fabric positioned how I wanted it (with a ironed ~1-inch hem), I stapled the top in the hemline and then brought the draped fabric over it.  Unfortunately I was in deep thinking mode working out the logistics and forgot to take pictures during this process.  Then I slowly made my way down one side of the back with my staple gun.  For the second side and bottom, I pulled out my trusty glue gun and hot glued it.  To finish I made a skirt of my fabric but made the front piece of the skirt to match the back of the chair, this was put on using the recycled cardboard strip pieces from the underside of the chair .  I had two yards of trim to use where the top part of the chair and the skirt connected.  There was a slight oops with that.  Tell me if you notice what it is in the comments and I’ll confirm for you.  

All in all I’m extremely excited about the way it turned out and I will be fixing that oops a.s.a.p.  I know have the chair for my desk.

  

Again folks, don’t judge the clutter.  I was so happy to be done with this project, that I didn’t think about proper photo staging.  You will get a cleaner view when I do the big reveal of the office later. 

What do ya’ think?