Upholstered Footstool: Before and After

Perhaps some of you may remember this beauty I picked up at a friend's garage sale for only TWO dollars?!?! Here is a shot of it before I started the Nitty Gritty transformation:

This stool is a well-constructed piece with gorgeous detail on the round legs. My plan was to sand blast the legs and paint them and then recover the stool with new fabric. The hardest part of the entire project was deciding on a fabric. I chose Waverly Pen Pal Parchment.

The legs came off pretty easily, as they were screwed on. Here is a close-up shot of one of the legs before I sand blasted them:

Very nice detail, but the finish was old and there were a number of cracks in the legs that needed repairing.

I used my husband's sandblaster to remove the finish from all four legs. This process took merely minutes as opposed to hand sanding. I can't imagine the time it would have taken to get into all the little crevices to remove the old finish. Here is a shot of me using the ultra-cool sand blaster:

Here is a close up of one of the legs after I sand blasted it:

Before and after again. What a difference!

I washed the sand blasted legs and gave them plenty of time to air dry before I started filling the cracks with wood putty.

This was a little tricky. I put some wood putty in a plastic baggie, snipped off the end and gently squeezed the putty into the cracks. I used paintable and stainable wood putty by Elmer's. Once the cracks were filled and the putty was dry, I sanded off the rough edges.

After the putty was good and dry and clean of any rough edges, I used Krylon's Satin Black to spray them. I used several light coats, allowing about an hour between coats for drying.

I really wanted the detail to show through on these legs, so I distressed them using my Dremel tool.

I removed the old fabric from the stool and preserved the original stuffing since it was in pretty decent shape. I looked at several on-line fabric stores for just the right fabric. I selected Waverly's Pen Pal Parchment, which features a neutral background and black French script. It has a classic feel to it that could easily fit in with several different types of decor. Here is the finished product: I'm digging it!

Before and After:



Before





After

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