Painting & Reupholstering A Stool
This is another post that John hoped me to name Stool Boom (here is why John likes that name). Anyway, a while back I redid a stool that was not ours. It simply showed up in the mail and I spruced it up. More on the mysterious mail thing in a minute. First here is how I got ‘er done. This is a terrible before shot, but picture an old beat up periwinkle blue stool with nails and holes and a rotting wood top:
The first thing I did was get all the old nails out with the back of a hammer:
Then I primed it and painted it a rich navy color (I simply grabbed a $3 test pot of paint in Benjamin Moore’s Santa Monica Blue). Ignore the crazy-bright blue color going on in this picture – it is a quite strange camera trick. In real life = navy. Anyway, after my two coats of paint were dry, I dug up some extra loft batting (originally from JoAnn) that I already had and some fabric that I had around as well. Why? Because I am low-cost. And it is not my stool. Haha. If you are keeping track, so far, I had sunk $3 into someone else’s stool.
Then I got fancy and picked up two $1.79 boxes of decorative nail heads (from JoAnn). I know, I splurged. What can I say, I am a giver.
I figured I could use these folks to secure my batting and my fabric along each side of the stool. So I simply cut the batting and the fabric about two inches larger than the top of the stool on all sides, and pulled the excess down and folded it under for a pleasant clean line. Then I tapped each nail head into place to keep things secure. I spaced them about 2″ apart (and used a 2″ piece of cardboard as a spacer to keep the gaps consistent). About thirty taps later I had done one side…
I continued to tap my way around the other three sides and I was left with a sweet little stool to not call my own. Total cost: $6.58. Except I have no earthly idea why she looks royal blue again. See the pics above – that is likely the most true that the blue looks. So it is a pleasant rich color but not too bright in real life.
Here is a full shot from the side (the same pic I should have taken as a before instead of a zoomed in crazy one):
Then I hugged her, kissed her (more than once), and lovingly sent her off. Sniffle. Weird stool business going on, right?
Well, it was in fact for the fine folks at Do It Yourself magazine…
… where we have a Q and A column called “He Said, She Said“…
… but in our column we do not redo furniture, so the stool was for another article they were running in their winter issue about makeovers by a few bloggers who all received surprise items in the mail to redo. There were some fairly remarkable fellow bloggers in the mix, like: Style Me Fairly, Centsational Girl, Jen Geigley, Renegade Handmade, and Lori Andrews. It was truly lively see what they did, like this two-tiered-table turned cake stand from Style Me Fairly:
And here is my little stool makeover. I enjoy how they styled it with yarn because of all the craft stuff that I have in our house, I have zero yarn. Haha.
Oh and truly savvy folks might even recognize the fabric as one of the ones we used for Clara’s weekly pictures. We enjoy how it looks like water and the bean looks like she’s swimming in this pic.
After making her quilt and birthday banner there was still more than sufficient for a surprise stool makeover. Gotta enjoy it. What furniture have you folks been making over lately? Any painting or reupholstering going on? And children swimming around on fabric? Hey, if it makes ’em glad…
Psst- We might be biased, but we think this video of Clara singing a medley of songs is the cutest thing ever. That girl loves to sing!
