OMG – It actually works! See how we re-did this French style chair.

Welcome back to our $100 Room Challenge hosted by Erin at Lemons, Lavender, and Laundry for the month of July! For those of you who are first visiting, welcome! Each of the awesome bloggers you will see at the bottom of this post are taking one room in their homes and making them over with only a budget of $100!

If you missed the first couple weeks see them here:

Week 1 / Week 2 / Week 3 (You are here) / Week 4

One of the things we wanted to complete for this challenge was to bring in a couple of bergere style chairs. We had a set of 2 chairs in our stash of furniture that we decided would fit the bill. The chairs have some beautiful detail (ya gotta love detail, right?).

However the fabric, while in good condition, just wasn’t the color or style that we wanted. What to do…well first off we knew they needed painting to update them a bit! We decided on a creamy off white and set out to do that.

But what the heck were we going to do with the fabric? We really didn’t have time to recover them and be able to include them in our final view of this room. Especially with all the other furniture projects we are doing for this room! Originally when we bought these, we fully intended to change out the fabric, but then we hit on the idea of painting the fabric! Yes! Painting it! We’ve heard of other people trying this and Annie Sloan herself claimed it can be done. We have always wanted to try it, so we decided, why not?! Let’s try it –  if it doesn’t work we can always come back to our original plan of recovering them. So we got out a can of one of our favorites – a greige color chalk paint by Annie Sloan.

(After the first coat of paint on the fabric)

We started out doing what so many other bloggers recommend – wetting the fabric down with water and then applying the chalk paint (we mixed the paint with water also, as a 1:1 ratio) then applied the mixture to the fabric. Now, we can honestly say that this first coat looked like it barely even covered the fabric at all. But we kept going!

We allowed the first coat to dry completely. When we checked it again after 24 hours or so, it was dry but felt kind of rough and crusty. Well…we just kept going to see what would happen! We had read to lightly sand the fabric to remove some of the roughness. We then applied a second coat of paint, again in the same ratio, but without spraying it with water first. Then again allowed it to dry for another 24 hours. So this coat was a little better, but we could still see some of the color as well as some of the pattern. This was NOT what we wanted!

Ok, now we went too far to give up on it! We decided to again apply another coat of the chalk paint and water mixture, only this time we mixed the ratio in a 3:1 proportion. We applied this one and crossed our fingers that this one would work. And it did! Wow! We are absolutely in love with how these turned out! From there, it was just a matter of finishing off our painted wood touch-ups.

To seal the pieces we used wax. Over the painted wood parts and the fabric. If the fabric is still crusty, lightly sand it again first and then wax.

We can’t wait to show you how these fit in with our whole room scheme. Updating this family room is really going to tie my entire downstairs together. I can’t wait to show you all the completed look! Stay tuned for next weeks reveal!

We can officially say –  Painting fabric actually works!

And don’t forget to check out all the other rooms our friends are making over for this $100 Room Challenge in the linkup below. There are some great ones!

Sharing with: The Scoop

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