Furniture Flip | Italian Caned Chairs

This is a furniture flip you won’t believe! A pair of caned chairs with damaged caning was no problem to flip! Let me show you how we did it!

dark, dingy, damaged

First, let me show you how these chairs first appeared to me at an auction. Dark, dingy, and damaged.

You know, your typical find at an auction. We LOVE finding pieces like this to do a furniture flip on!!

whoa, nelly…..

Let me back up a bit and remind you of the steps it took to get to this point of the furniture flip!

First, we prepped, cleaned, and repaired the chairs:

Repairing Furniture | Italian Caned Chairs

Then we did a little makeover using fabric:

Furniture Makeover Ideas | Italian Caned Chairs

the reveal

And that leads us to where we are now, The Reveal. We all love a good reveal and believe me, this furniture flip does not disappoint!

milk paint & grain sack

The milk paint finish on this pair in Miss Mustard Seed Milk Paint “Artissimo” is perfection in my opinion!

And the grain sack style fabric with the subtle blue stripe matches it perfectly, don’t you think?

Dark blue can be such a neutral in many homes. In fact, it’s a color I want to start to incorporate into our home.

Stay tuned for that, I am also hoping to share more of our home and how we use the vintage farmhouse style in our decor.

Remember when we distressed the milk paint finish? It really helps to bring out the details of the furniture!

You can also see the different tones of the paint. See the darker and lighter areas? Just another reason to love milk paint!

upholstery & cushion covers

The backs of the chairs are upholstered but I made removable and washable seat cushions for the chairs. The fact that the covers can be removed and washed will make these chairs even more desirable for the lucky buyer!

Besides, I couldn’t resist buying this vintage-style zipper tape!

The light-colored fabric helps to show off the caning, don’t you think?

contrasting details

And the seats have the same look even though the seat is actually a painted piece of wood. We wanted to add some stability to the old caning so we added plywood to the underside of the chair seats.

Even though it is in excellent condition, we felt it was best to make the seats more durable. We want these chairs to last for years to come!

Don’t you love the double cording on the back of the chairs?? It really is a great way to show off the curvy lines of these Italian-made chairs!

made in Italy!

Yes, I just said, “Italian made!!” Believe me, I just about came out of my seat when I saw this stamp on the bottom of the chairs!! “Made in Italy” is stamped on the underside of each chair. The letters are about 1″ tall and very bold.

I love details like this so much!!

furniture flip

This furniture flip was a great project to work on. It included a little bit of everything:

• easy repairs
• cleaning and prepping
• painting
• upholstery
• sewing

Just a few of my favorite things to do!

Did you enjoy this tutorial? Let me know in the comments! I would love to hear from you!

If you have any questions, feel free to email me and ask! I would love to help you with your own furniture flip project!

Thanks for joining us here on the blog! We love sharing our tutorials with you!

You can see Part One and Part Two in these two posts:

• Repairing Furniture | Italian Caned Chairs
• Furniture Makeover Ideas Italian Caned Chairs

Join us on Instagram and Facebook too! We share some behind the scenes of many of our projects! Pin any image you see as a future reference to your furniture makeover boards on Pinterest – you never know when you might need help with your next furniture flip!