Happy B.C. Day to all my Canadian (British Columbian) friends and elsewhere! It’s a holiday here in B.C. so i almost didn’t blog today but I was so excited to “chair” this new project with you – a Repurposed Chair Swing!

Mr. G made the fatal mistake of lamenting on Saturday that he had no woodworking projects on the go. Did i hear him correctly???  I have a million ideas for him – naturally . Next weekend we are celebrating my daughter Jessica’s birthday so that means the grandkids will be over!  They are too young to use my old swing so i kept pondering how we could make it safe for the little ones to use.

A quick visit to Pinterest and a search for chair swings yileded much inspiration!  All i had to do was find an old chair……….

Well wouldn’t you know it – there next to the Casbah shed stood a forlorn looking chair, peeling and rather ugly don’t you think?  It was one of my treasures from a big haul on Curbside recycling week 9 years ago .  So i pulled it out and showed Mr. G and said “can you chop off these legs and make some sort of arms for this thing and attach it to the old swing please?”

I seriously don’t think this is what he had in mind when he said he didn’t have any woodworking projects but i guess he thought this would have to do in a pinch.  He chopped off the legs and then pondered about what to do for arms.

While i was away food shopping Mr. G came up with the idea of using the legs as arms and also using the leg cross struts for arms too (if you know what i mean). He screwed them in nicely and then made some circular wood disks for the top of the arms (there were big holes in the chair legs for some reason). You could alternately use wooden balls as end caps.

Because I will be doing most of the swinging around the magic cottage the swing had to fit my hips . So Mr. G had me try out the swing before going any further.  My pre-gluten free hips would not have made the cut I’m afraid (those 11 extra pounds would have made it an incredibly tight squeeze).  Check out this blogpost about a journal page i created about my tummy talking to me.

After sanding the peeling chair vigorously Mr. G primed the chair with Zinsser Primer.

Mr. G had to test if this rope configuration would work or not.  It took a while to figure out where the ropes had to go in order for the swing to not tip.  Trust me – it’s not as easy as it looks. We used a tree limb that is on an angle which posed some interesting challenges.

I got the easy part – all i had to do is spray paint the chair with Rustoleum Painters Touch Ultra Cover 2 x spray paint.  The colour i chose looks sort of like my top!

I love how juicy the colour turned out.  I had some extra spray paint left and ended up spraying a wooden birdhouse i had lying around. That’s for another blogpost.

The first hole was drilled at the top of the rear upright of the chair.

The second hole was drilled in the bottom of the rear upright of the chair. As you can see Mr. G screwed the old swing base to the bottom of the chair. The nylon rope (1/2”)  was fed through the holes and then knotted as you see here. Mr. G used the existing hole in the swing to feed the front rope into (from the underside). All in all the cost of the swing was about 28 dollars counting the rope and the spray paint.  We had the primer and screws and glue already and the chair was free.

Voila!  Isn’t it cute?  I must say I’m not overly cranked about the way Mr. G wrapped the ropes around the chair but quite honestly I don’t feel the cute chairs we saw on Pinterest would hold adults.  This one is safe.  Now when the wee grandkids go on the swing all I’ll have to do is attach a belt to the front of the arms.  When Mr. G’s grandson Leium who is six years old comes to visit he won’t be needing the belt.

There – doesn’t the chair fit in perfectly with the Magic Cottage vibe? If you like this project and want to save it for future project ideas why not pin it on Pinterest? 

Thank you to all of you who submitted feedback for my website Re-evaluation.  If you haven’t submitted any of your ideas please click the link and submit in the comments section to be eligible to win some of my whimsical coasters!

Love, Violette xo