I bought the Latt children’s table and chair set from Ikea for my daughters’ playroom last summer. They mostly use them for coloring and drawing so the set doesn’t get a whole lot of hard-playing use, but after six months of adults and kids sitting on them the seats of the chairs looked like this:
At $19.99 for the set I can’t say I was totally surprised. The seats and tabletop are made of a semi-sturdy cardboard so I didn’t really expect them to live a long life. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye yet, though. They’re the right size for my girls and I’m never worried about them getting colored or painted on because of the cost.
I wanted a pretty quick fix, though, and didn’t want to spend a lot of time or money fixing the chairs.
To fix them I bought a few 1×2 pine boards from Lowes and cut them down to the same length as the seats from front to back. For the two side pieces on each chair I cut boards a bit shorter to account for the sides of the chair backs.
Once the pieces were cut and sanded I primed and painted the shorter side pieces white.
Then I carefully lined the boards up with the edges of the seat and used 1 1/4″ wire brads to attach them to the seat frame.
I centered a stencil I already had on the seats, sprayed with some adhesive, and painted the starbursts with raspberry pink acrylic paint.
Then I marked and taped 1 1/2″ (the actual width of a 1×2) across the front and back and primed and painted it white just like the side pieces.
Once all the paint was dry I used a black Sharpie and a straight edge to draw a line around the center of the white painted square and reunited the chairs with their table in the playroom.
The set is really lightweight and easy to move around the room as we need more or less space in the center.
My top priority was making the chairs sturdy enough for any of us to sit on, which they are now, but I love that they’re pretty now too.
I’m so glad I could salvage this set for a little while longer!
