Custom Dining Room Set Using Garage Sale Finds

Welcome! When we moved into our new house we all of a sudden had an interesting problem...we have a Dining Room, but no furniture to go in it.  Now that we have a space for entertaining, I really wanted appropriate furniture to do that with, but finding a table and chair set that will seat 12-ish people for a reasonable amount of money is REALLY hard!  I searched Craigslist, furniture warehouses and several discount furniture stores and came to the conclusion that the table and chair set of my dreams is not affordable, therefore unattainable...UNTIL!!!

I found a LARGE table on Craigslist that can be smaller for everyday life (seat 4 - 6 people) but will expand with leaves for up to 14 people!!  That's GIANT...not really cute mind you, but large nonetheless.  It also came with 4 very tall cane backed chairs.  I don't like cane backed chairs, but hey, it was in my price range and solid...so we got it.  Here's the table:

 And here are the original chairs:

 

Beautiful huh? :) Eeek!

 

Well, so after several antagonizing hours of trying to find 6 other matching chairs so that I could put together something that remotely matched, I decided that THEY DON'T HAVE TO MATCH!! What a brilliant concept!  So, thus started the search for random chairs.  I decided I needed 6 chairs that didn't match and then I'd refinish them to look similar! And what did I do with the Cane backed chairs you ask? Well, they are the head chairs of course!  I came across this blog on a tutorial on how to convert cane backed chairs into a Parson's chair and was relieved!! Yay! So I went to our local fabric store and picked out some great fabric and created this finished product!

 

             

 

SO much cuter than the original chairs!

Want to make one yourself?!  You can!  Here's the tutorial on how to make this chair happen! 

It's really not hard at all!!

 

So to find the other chairs I literally searched every garage sale in the area and started picking up random single wooden chairs.  Some I convinced the owner to break up a set of 3 or 2 to acquire, some really were just single chairs. Most of the chairs I picked up were $2 or $3.  The most I paid for one was $10.  Regardless, here is what I ended up with.

 

     

This one did not come this pretty. :) These are the after pics.  I forgot to take the before pictures. It was a horrible deep red color.  This is one of my favorite finds though as it was only $2!!

 

 

This one is a folding chair and came with a twin!!

So let the process begin! I now have a total of 10 chairs (11 if you count the twin folding chair).  I will be refinishing all of them to be black chairs with a Pottery Barn distressing look.  I've already finished 2 of the chairs! Here's the after of one of them...

 

Click here for the tutorial on how I achieved this look! And come back to see it when all of them are done!  I'll be posting pictures as I finish a chair. :) I also plan on painting the table as well, but since we are currently using it, that will take some creativity.

 

Here's another finished chair!

 

 

So now we're getting really close to a full set! 1 more Parsons Chair is completed and to finish it out until I get another side chair done, I added a black folding chair.  Here's what it looks like so far!

 

I'm really happy with how it's turning out! What do you think?!