Upgrading Patio Chairs With Old Fence Slats

So this patio set is one we (we being me and my husband, that's his butt in the video hehe) have had forever and I was not ready to get rid of even though it looked horrific. Instead we are going to upgrade it so that we do not have to buy cushions for it again (our dog really likes to eat weird things such as chair cushions). It was getting quite expensive repeatedly replacing the seat cushions so we are upgrading and making them cushion-less. We are only completing two of the chairs for the entry as we do not have time to do the full set by the end date.

To start we had to wash down the chairs and remove the strapping that held the cushions up for sitting in.

Once we got the chairs cleaned up we decided what we were going to do to them. We made a trip to the store and purchased the wood, clasps, nuts, bolts, weather sealer, primer and paint we would need. In total we are completing this upgrade for about $40.00, I am not adding what we spent on the paint stripper since we ended up not getting any use out of it for this project. Keep in mind we are doing this for four chairs and a table.

After measuring out the size of the seat area the boards are cut to fit it, and of course a recount of nuts and bolts is made to make sure we had enough. We used some older but still decent looking cedar fence planks (why the project was much cheaper than expected). We just sanded them and smoothed them out a little, not completely because we wanted the roughed up look of the wood. Then we stained and weather sealed the planks and let them dry for two days.

In this step you can choose to use a paint stripper. We tried one that was organic as we have three babies in the house and it did not work well at all. So we had to go with the manual way of removing the old paint. We used a drill, a grinder and wire wheels to do the paint stripping. Sorry there were no photos of this mess in action. Be prepared to do this outside because it does make a huge dusty mess of everything (Husband is still cleaning the garage up). This is the chair after the mess, just a nice clean aluminum surface.

We were informed that we would not have to use primer with the paint we chose but we did primer anyway just to be on the safe side. For this we used a spray paint gun and air compressor to paint the chairs because you get less glob and drip marks from the primer. Let dry about 8 hours if low humidity, longer if it is high humidity.

Once the primer has dried it is time for the paint. Using the same tools as for the primer, we painted the chair our choice of color. Thought this would give it an old cast iron look. Again, let dry for about 8 hours depending on the humidity, longer if it is very humid.

Once the paint is dried and you have checked the chair over for minor details and fixes you can start placing the wood and hardware on the chair.

Place chairs where you want them and have a seat!