DINING CHAIR TURNED DESK CHAIR

Years ago, we purchased a new dining room suite that included six dining chairs. I recently decided that I no longer wanted to keep the chairs because they were quite dated looking now, and I wanted to go with more comfortable upholstered chairs for our dining room table instead.

I decided to donate the old dining chairs, and just as I was getting ready to drop them off at the donation center I chose to keep the two end chairs and only donate the four side chairs. As I looked at those end chairs, I was reminded of why I purchased them to begin with so many years ago. I really loved the modern shape! Plus, these were well made solid wood chairs. The fabric had definitely seen better days, but I knew that if I kept these chairs I could likely find a way to repurpose them at some point down the road.

Well, I’ve figured out what to do with one of them. I realized that it would make a great looking desk chair in my new home office, and would also save me the money of having to buy a brand new one.

one of my old dining room end chairs

But in order to make this old dining chair work in my office it was going to need a makeover!

This really was a very simple transformation.

I removed the seat cushion from the chair.

I gave the wood frame a quick light sanding and then primed it.

I painted it with a high gloss enamel in Valspar’s ‘Still Life in Gray’.

I then removed the old seat fabric.

I covered it with new upholstery fabric, Waverly’s Delancey Diamond print in Charcoal.

Just looking solely at the chair, I think this fabric print is kind of boring. I definitely think a larger print would’ve looked better and been really fun, but I was choosing a print not just based on how it looked on the chair itself, but how it looked in the whole room. This chair will sit in an area that’s surrounded by a bold printed rug and the printed ottomans I reupholstered recently so I really felt like the print for this chair needed to be a smaller scale so it wasn’t competing with the other large patterns happening around it.

I reattached the seat cushion to the chair. And my new desk chair is ready to go! I have repainted my desk white, and I think this gray chair will really pop behind it.