Make Mine Eclectic

Bench Project

March 6, 2009 at 10:54 am (Projects) (antique, bench, chippy, coral, craigslist, decor, decorate, diy, do it yourself, fabric, home, house, Inspiration, material, porch, project, red, redo, retro, reupholster, seat, shabby, vintage, white)

When we first moved into our new house Tony and I bought a vintage vanity on Craigslist for $20 to go in our spare bedroom. The vanity is used to hold all of my “get ready in the morning stuff”. The vanity came with a little vanity bench. The problem was that the bench didn’t match the vanity. The bench was painted white and had obviously been recovered with some purple material. I had thought about painting the vanity a shabby white, but that wouldn’t solve the whole problem. The styles and sizes of the vanity and the bench didn’t even match. So, I put the bench up for sale on Craigslist, again. After a couple of weeks the bench still hadn’t sold. Well, another project for me!

I liked the chipped white paint of the bench, so I decided to keep it. I also decided that there were too many things, including another, smaller vintage vanity seat already in the spare bedroom. I thought that the front porch could use something, so that was to be the new home of the bench. We have a small, white ice cream table and two chairs on the porch, but nothing else so far. The white would be a perfect match. I have also had my eyes peeled for some of those vintage metal lawn chairs. I want two of them in red, or to paint red. That helped me make my choice for fabric. I chose a white material with a red coral pattern.

Last night I started ripping old fabric off the bench. Come to find out there was not only one layer of awful fabric, but three! Here’s the before photo:

The next layer. Even worse:

And the final dingy layer:

But, here’s what it looks like all spruced up:

I think its really cute now. I will show you pictures of what it looks like on the porch once I get the ice cream set repainted!