A funny thing happened last December. I was this close to finishing my dining room and bam! I changed directions and started working on the kitchen. I had a good reason. The island is between the kitchen and dining room and until it was finished, the whole space was undone. So I switched gears and knocked out my kitchen. After all the dust settled, I decided it was time to finally finish the dining room. Since there were a few steps in this process, I decided to break it up into segments (so I don't overload you). One of those steps was new seating.

The kids wanted a dining bench so I built them one (see it here). The hubs and I were using the same Louis chairs I bought from RH a few years earlier, and I had planned to keep them - until my husband told me how uncomfortable they were. Sigh... I looked for months and found nothing. Then one day, I headed to my favorite fabric store but decided to stop into a consignment store first. After a brief walk around the store, I found this:

There were a total of 4 chairs - 2 arm and 2 side chairs. I sent a pic to the hubs, got his blessing and threw them in the back of the car.

I had planned to sand them and then stain them but that went out the window because - get this - they reeked of smoke. That's the problem with buying furniture in a consignment store. Since everything pretty much smells old, it's hard to notice that the chairs you are buying smell like they lived inside a smoking lounge. We had hoped it was just the cushions but it wasn't. Luckily, a good priming and painting would take care of the odor.

I started off by sanding the chair.

After sanding it completely (and wiping it down with mineral spirits to remove the dust) I primed the entire chair. Note: I used spray paint on the cane.

After priming the chair, I painted it with Driftwood Milk Paint from General Finishes.

Next, I immediately wiped off the paint. Note: I worked in small sections so the paint wouldn't dry before I could wipe it off.

For the cane, I painted it with a paint brush and then wiped it off.

After painting the chair/while the chair was drying, I moved on to recovering the cushion. Normally I would keep the cushion and seat base, but that wasn't an option here. First, I traced the outline of the cushion onto a 1/2" piece of wood that would serve as the new seat base (luckily, the seat base was easy to remove since it was just screwed onto the chair). And then onto cushion.

Finally, I recovered the cushion with the new fabric and attached the cushion to the seat base using spray adhesive. I reattached the seat base to the chair and the final result? Check it out!

So what do you think? Not bad for a consignment store find.

As far as cost, here's the breakdown:

The chairs were $135 for a set of 4
The fabric was on killer sale for $10 a yard for a total of $40 (for all 4 chairs)
The cushions were $20 (for all 4 chairs)
Both the primer and paint were leftovers from previous project

Total cost for all 4 chairs: $195.

We are really loving these high back beauties and work wonderfully in the space. So, what's next? See how I faked it until I made it with our dining room table.