The Cutest Seat in the House
For most of today’s post, we’ll be hanging out in my disaster of a garage. This is the trigger warning for all you neat freaks; I cannot be held liable for any trauma you may incur upon viewing these images.
A friend’s son loved this little chair and sat in it so much that the raffia was starting to fray. She was concerned about him randomly falling through one day and asked me if I could come up with a solution. I don’t know from raffia, but I do know my way around upholstery, so I offered to build a tiny new seat for it.
Once the raffia was removed, it became apparent that the top four dowels needed to be sanded and painted. We don’t need little man getting splinters while playing in his favorite spot.
Ahh, splinter-free and freshly painted. I didn’t have any paint that matched the original color exactly, so I gave the whole kit-and-caboodle a couple coats of a red that I had on hand.
Next came the part I felt the most resistance about figuring out. This was just a kid’s chair right? Super low stakes. Nevertheless, I was intimidated. I shifted my mindset from can’t-screw-this-up to let’s-see-what-happens and got out some cardboard to create a template for the wood. My original plan was for the seat to sit on top of the upper dowels, so I flipped the chair upside-down and traced the outline on the cardboard.
In the back of my mind, there was the possibility that the seat would be too high if I installed it there. Yup. It was too high.
I flipped the chair upside-down one more time and traced a template using the lower dowels as a guide. Much better.
After trimming the template obsessively to make sure the wood would fit, I traced it onto some spare plywood, clamped the wood down, and got to work with my jig saw.
Perfect fit.
But no one wants to sit on plywood, so next came the foam. I had some laying around from some chairs I took apart last year (we’ll get to that story later, I’m sure). I just couldn’t throw that padding away because something told me I would find a use for it and kick myself if I made the mistake of getting rid of it. Once again, my hoarding instincts served me well. Marie Kondo would be horrified.
But once again, the overall thickness of the foam and wood made the final seat too high, so I used a bread knife to slice the foam in half. Problem solved.
With the part of the project that required the most problem-solving out of the way, I was finally back in familiar territory. The mindless simplicity of stapling the batting to the bottom of the plywood was a welcome change of pace.
My friend provided an adorable table cloth for use as upholstery fabric and I was a touch nervous about getting the pattern to line up, but I was in the home stretch, so I pushed through. The finished seat fit pretty snuggly, but I wanted to make absolutely sure it wouldn’t slip off if Little One got especially wiggly, so I screwed it in from the bottom.
I’m super excited to see her munchkin hanging out on this chair. While he’s still little enough, that is. They grow up so fast.😭😭😭