Makeover for an old beach chair

I was cleaning off my patio and I had this old beach chair laying around taking up space. The plastic seating was literally falling apart and I was about to toss the whole thing in the trash. Then I thought, why don't I try to give this old thing a makeover? If it doesn't work out, it can still go in the trash. But maybe it WILL work out. Well, spoiler alert. It worked out. I'm going to show you what i did in case you can use any of my advice for your own projects.

To start off with, my chair is not the type that you can unscrew. That would have made things easier. Instead, I had to figure out a way to replace this plastic fabric that was falling apart each time i touched it, and somehow get the new fabric on without the use of a sewing machine. It would have also been easier if this chair had some kind of crossbar at the front and back of the seat so that i could have woven a new seat and backrest. Alas, this was also not the case so i had to figure out something.

The first thing i did was cut the old fabric off. Then I decided i would paint the frame. I'd never seen a gold beach chair before and I thought that might look snazzy so I got some gold spray paint and after some light sanding, covered it in the new paint. I think it came out pretty nice.

Now the tricky part of attaching fabric to a chair that can not be taken apart. I thought I might have to stitch the fabric to the chair by hand but decided to try a different route. For the backrest, I opted to make a cover similar to a pillowcase and I just slipped it down over the fame. Easy, and I could use the sewing machine after all!

The seat was not so simple. I decided I'd make the seat in two parts. A top and bottom piece, and then use zippers to zip them around the frame. Well that would have been great if the zippers that I bought unzipped all the way like they were supposed to. If you go this route, test your zippers first so you don't have to undo everything.

Next I got some "heavy duty" velcro. I thought that could be a good replacement for the zippers but unfortunately when i had that finished and set up on the chair, it immediately came apart when i sat on the chair. So this was getting frustrating and difficult. In the end I decided to weave paracord on the seat so there would be support, just going back and forth on the frame. Then I put the fabric cover back on with the velcro and this actually worked!

I like how it turned out in the end. Maybe learn from some of my mistakes and hopefully you will also end up with a cool new chair that you love!