Simply Beautiful By Angela

creating simple beauty on a budget

DIY Industrial Stool

Hello and happy Friday everyone! As you may remember I’m in the process of giving our entire basement a makeover to give it an industrial farmhouse look and I must say, I’m having so much fun with it!
As always I’m on a tight budget so I’ve been using a lot of our old items and tweaking them to fit with the new decor. I love finding ways to use what I already have rather than getting rid of it–it’s so rewarding! 
So anyways, I once shared how I took our breakfast bar stools that used to look like this:

To this:

You can read that tutorial here. It was one of my first projects ever (awww!) and even though they turned out pretty nice, I silently cheered when the bottom rung on one of them snapped because that meant that I had an excuse to splurge on some nail head trim saddle stools that I’ve been eying for awhile. When I get around to taking new home tour pictures you’ll see how perfect they are! 
I tried to sell them but I had no takers–even when I dropped the price to $10 for both. Sad right?? But one day I was hanging out in the garage playing with Tristan when I had an itch to start a new project and I came up with a vision for my poor neglected stools. 
I started by removing the fabric, cushion and staples and then sanded the original dark stain away from the top. 
Who would have thought that there was all of that pretty wood grain just hiding out under that yucky dark stain? I restained it with my favorite which is miniwax Provincial:  
Once it was dry I used two mixing bowls as my template (fancy huh?) to trace two circles, one a little bit bigger than the other.

I used a super tiny paintbrush to carefully fill it in.

I applied a coat of white paint over the legs and sanded them once it was dry to pull out the original light brown paint.

Yes that is our brand new dining table that I’m daringly painting on and I got a very worried look from my husband while I was doing this haha. But there was a mini blizzard outside and it was freezing in the garage!  Don’t worry, the towel caught everything 🙂

To finish it up, I printed out some text in pretty fonts and used a pen to create an impression of the text in the wood. I took my phone flashlight and held it up to outline the impression in pen so that it was easier to see where I needed to paint. An amazing revelation that has drastically improved my homemade art!

After a quick sanding on the top this is what I ended up with!

Isn’t it so purdy now?
Eventually I think I’m going to repair the rung on the other stool and make a “No 2” stool. 
We had an awkward empty little corner in the basement and this handsome guy fills the space perfectly. I’m so happy I didn’t up selling them!
I’ll be back next week with another fun DIY project.  I’ve been saving them up because I haven’t had the time to blog but I promise I’ll get to all of them! And hopefully in the not so distant future I will be sharing the basement reveal, even though I still feel like I’m super far away!
Have a fantastic weekend peeps! 🙂
 Linking up to these awesome parties!

Comments

  2. Angela, your stool came out great! I've experimented with different transfer methods and but I've never tried yours – pinning! Thank you for linking up to #HomeMattersParty this week.

    Julie
    LiveFromJuliesHouse.com