Upcycling - The first of many home DIY projects

If you follow me on Instagram or subscribe to my newsletter, you probably know that I recently moved house. After 2 years of living back at home with my wonderful (and long suffering) parents, my fiance and I have managed to buy our first flat. It is in very good condition as we didn’t want a huge project for our first property, but there is lots of decorating to do which I can't wait to get stuck into! Even just choosing paint colours and themes for each room is a fairly daunting job so I have been starting small, with easily achievable jobs which are starting to make the place feel like ours.

Having previously lived in furnished flats, we inevitably have to purchase a few new pieces of furniture such as a sofa. However, where we can, we are trying to update what we already have and find vintage/second hand items as it tends to be more cost effective and results in a unique space filled with individual, special pieces that have a story.

My first DIY project was to give two old chairs a new lease of life, and make them in more in keeping with the colour scheme for our kitchen. This little DIY project took approximately 1 hour from start to finish (thanks to my dad for helping me) but has made a huge difference to the kitchen already!

The two chairs pictured above belonged to my parents. My parents inherited them from my grandparents who bought them second hand when my dad was a child. My Grandad re-covered them after buying them in a mustard yellow faux leather fabric (funnily enough, very much back in fashion now!) My dad re-covered them again when they were passed down to him, in a dark blue woven fabric to fit with the room in which they would live for my childhood. Instead of buying new chairs for our kitchen, we decided to make the most of these. The blue covers were looking fairly worn but despite being close to 100 years old, the wood chair frame had so much life left in it, so it seemed a shame to not make the most of a solid piece of design and craftsmanship that had allowed these chairs to live for so long already.

I bought the gorgeous piece of fabric to re-cover the chairs from another Cockpit Arts maker, Alice Timmis. Alice sells off-cuts of her woven lengths of fabric at the Cockpit Arts open studios and when I saw this design, I knew it would work perfectly in our green kitchen! The weave is quite dense, creating a warm and weighty fabric that is perfect for cushion or seat covers.

Below, are some photographs documenting the up-cycling process of removing the old covers and adding the new, as well as the finished product. I think that they came out pretty well and on top of how they look, the history of them is so special. Such simple wooden chairs that have been in my family for over 60 years and in the world for much longer than that. They’ve seen just about everything from births to deaths, birthdays to anniversaries and Christmas dinners and it makes me so happy to be giving them a new lease of life and making new memories on them. Hopefully we can keep passing them down through the generations for years to come.