Chairs

Sam helped me finally get the craft room organized and cleaned up (on his birthday no less!), and I love having an orderly place to work on projects.  There's also a table for the kids to do crafty things on, the one that used to be the lego table, and then we replaced the top with our old kitchen table, so it's a shorter legged table.  But it's lacking kid sized seating.  So we decided to build some chairs.  We have 2 small ikea chairs (which I'm now realizing are a steal!), and we decided to use those as a guide to build our own.  Taking a cue from our locker build, we decided to go with MDF, as the boards are really straight, and pre-primed.

The tricky part about this design was how the seat works.  The 3 sides of the seat have a groove on the inside, that the seat slides into.  Sam has a table saw, and figured out how to make these cuts, although it's always a little nerve-wracking when you have to take all the safety devices off a tool to get it to do what you want.  But they came out perfect!

Unfortunately, I did the kreg-jig drilling, and it turns out that our MDF was less that 3/4 inch, and I had the drill bit set at a little bit greater than 3/4's inch.  So, in some spots, when we attached the parts, the wood split, or the screws poked through.  We took out the worst offenders, and just screwed in from the outside.


I wanted to find some cute contact paper (I had covered the white seats of our Ikea chairs a couple years earlier, and it just adds so much), but when I went shopping, there was really nothing out there.  It was also going to cost me more than it did to build the chair for one roll of paper, and I only needed a small amount.  Then I thought, I wonder if I can mod podge fabric to the seat?  I looked it up, and it can be done!

Using Mod Podge to cover the seat.

 So for the first chair, I took a leftover scrap of fabric from Olivia's roman shades and mod podged it on the seat.  I spray painted the chair in Krylon's Watermelon, and I sealed the whole thing (including the mod podged seat) with krylons clear sealer.  I think it turned out really cute! 

Olivia immediately declared the first chair was her's, and insisted that it be painted pink.

For the 2nd chair, I used a scrap from the roman shades in the kitchen, and painted the chair green.  I also simultaneously built and finished a larger chair.  This time, I got the Kreg Jig set up correctly (for 5/8th's thickness, instead of 3/4), and there were fewer problems, but the 90 degree joints were still troublesome.  I ended up having to put in some screws from the outside again.

I think I'm done trying to build chairs like this out of MDF, but I do want to try out making some of these folding chairs.  I think these would be perfect with a drop cloth canvas seat, maybe even stenciled with an initial or something.