Take a seat…

Or better yet, decorate one!

I think this may be my first IKEA hack.  Although I’m not sure it counts as a hack if you still use it for the purpose it was designed for. I’m not using a bed to make a fence or anything like that (don’t laugh, someone really did that!) I just took a very generic chair that looked very… well, IKEA and turned it into something with a bit more personality. I actually had two chairs so I tried a couple of different things.  So what did I start with?

Before

Not a bad looking chair!  And we used one of these for a while in our kitchen at our old house so I can confidently say that it’s really comfy for a wooden chair.  And survives a toddler very well! But I thought they could use a little somethin’somethin’.  I’ve been wanting to try “dipping” some legs for a while so that was my first step.  I taped off the legs at the same height all round:

and covered up the rest of the chair, before I sprayed the legs a lovely matt black:

That Rustoleum 2 x spraypaint is absolutely amazing stuff. I love it! I wish they had gold in it…..  Anyhoo, I digress.  Back to the chairs.  So I sprayed the legs in a very modern matt black and they looked like this:

I must admit that I quite like them just like this.  But it doesn’t make a big enough difference for a good ‘before and after’! And I’d also seen this image below which inspired me:

Etsy Store: The Lovely Wall

I thought triangles would be a nice easy shape to cut out from my trusty $3 roll of vinyl from Bunnings!

I was aiming for a look that was even but not perfect.  I wanted it to look like a hand printed material.  But on a chair.  So I used washi tape to mark out some even lines on the seat and then placed my triangles by hand, without measuring their placement.

After I trimmed the edges and removed the tape, I did the same on the upper portion of the chair.  And voila!  A finished chair!

I thought I would have a go at using just some washi tape on the other chair – a great way to make a design that you don’t want to be permanent!  I used the yellow washi tape since I had it out already.  I started with random yellow stripes on the seat.  I planned to do a few vertical stripes on the chair back but I ran out of tape!  I still liked the look though and will be interested to see how it lasts.  Here are the finished chairs:

And one last time, here is the Before and After: