Repurposed Chair Back Coat Rack

I recently shared this easy repurposed chair back coat rack  at Today’s Creative Life! Kim was having some friends share great projects, you really should check them out at her Celebrate Summer series.

Thrift store chair

This lonely chair had been marked at 5.03, but was 50% off when I bought it at Vendors’ Village. What a deal! A chair for only $2.50? I have this thing with chairs, if you’re interested you can listen to my podcast All About Thrift Store and Curb Shopping—where I discuss my top five things to look for when I’m junking.

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Remove the chair back

I began by removing the chair back from the chair seat, which was fairly simple to do by removing some screws.

Cut some of the length off the back of the chair

After the back was removed, I needed to cut the bulk of the legs away from the back. Although I did this  on my compound miter saw, but you could easily do it with a hand saw or a jig saw.

 

I was left with this small section of the chair back. I sanded some of the finish away, and as always, started painting the back of the project first.

Prepare to paint

I mixed up a quick batch of my diy chalky paint primer that I use on 90% of my projects and used my Homeright Finish Max to spray the chair back with my favorite white, Polished Pearl.

 

 

This was after the first coat, when I decided to fill in the detailed lines with some spackling.

 

Add embellishments to the repurposed chair back

I used some of my IOD paper clay molds to add some details to the top and the center of the chair back.

In fact I recently spent about 30 minutes making a bunch of molds using up an entire package of my paper clay so I would have plenty at hand for future projects.

 

After attaching two of the paper clay appliques with some Gorilla Wood Glue, I used some dark umber wax from Heirloom Traditions Paint to make the details of the appliques show up better

 

Coat hooks for repurposed chair back coat rack

I didn’t have any hooks from D. Lawless Hardware. So I used store bought hooks that were much higher. It’s definitely time to stock up on some more hooks from my friend Dave!

 

I had to switch out the screws of the double hooks with shorter ones, because the ones that came with these hooks were too long for the chair back.

Attach d rings for hanging

I used my favorite d rings to enable the coat rack to hang safely on the wall.

 

A coat rack on the fence? It was the best place for me to “stage” it for a good photograph.

 

 

 

Isn’t it amazing how beautiful it turned out? If you have an old chair and some hooks in your stash, you could make this project in an afternoon.

 

 

 

In case you are wondering what happened to the other half of the chair—I made a wall shelf out of the bottom of the chair and the back legs that I cut off the chair back.

 

So, with one $2.50 chair, I got two easy projects. Did I mention how much I LOVE chair projects?

What have you made out of a chair lately?

gail

See one of my first, and an all-time favorite chair projects here