In previous posts I have mentioned having a plan to spruce up our playroom / dining room.  Well, it had stalled for a while.  The next thing on my list to tackle was getting an extending dining table and some chairs.  The table needed to start off small enough not to get in the way when the room was in play-room mode, but extend to seat all the extended family comfortably.  I had seen something I wanted about 18 months ago, but it was expensive, so I decided to try to get something similar on eBay, and use it as an up cycling project.  After nearly a year and a half of monitoring eBay for second hand chairs and tables close to home, I finally got lucky. Someone was selling fifty chairs reclaimed from a closed-down restaurant, that were identical in shape to the ones I wanted. I managed to snap up eight of them for £20 each.  The only difference was that they were dark-stained wood and had a plasticky fake-wicker seat pad that had seen better days.  The perfect candidates for a makeover!  Here’s what they looked like to start with:

I got lucky with some fabric to re-cover the seat pads, when I found one being discontinued in John Lewis that was on sale at half price.  Armed with a staple-gun and some advice from Mum (“first secure the sides, then the corners, before filling in-between”), the seat-pads were really easy to re-cover.

I wanted to paint two each in four different colours to complement the other furniture in the room.  So two got painted in Annie Sloan’s Duck Egg Blue, the same as the mantel I had painted in the summer.  Two were Old White, which I had leftover from other projects.

The other four proved a little more problematic.  I tried to mix up a soft grey colour, but it took a few attempts to get a shade I was happy with. I initially decided to paint the final two chairs pink, to coordinate with the pink in the fabric, but after doing one of them, it just looked wrong.

So I painted them in Autentico’s French Grey (a blue-grey colour), to match the toy-cupboard that is just visible in the background to the pictures below, and in the process discovered a brilliant brand of chalk-paint that I hadn’t used before, and a fabulous interiors shop in nearby Marlow that stocks it, called Sara Hughes Home.  Worth a visit if you’re in the area!

The right table never did come up on eBay, but with the saving made on the chairs, I decided to stretch the budget to the one I had been wanting (although that hadn’t been delivered in time to feature in the photos!)