I've never had much interest in refurbishing furniture. But last month I volunteered to help Shelby's 6th-grade class refurbish a chair for their auction project (each class at their school creates a project that's sold at the annual auction) and I had a crash course in transforming a thrift-store chair into something awesome. 

I bought a chair at a thrift store for $10 and then asked Shelby to look at Pinterest for some inspiration. After some searching, she decided we'd be making a comic book chair. 

From the beginning of the project, one of my main goals was to keep the costs low. The chair I bought had a cushion, so I looked in my fabric stash for something we could use to reupholster it. I had some fun and soft blue fabric, which helped us decided on what comic book character we'd focus on — Superman. All the comic book chairs we saw had no central theme, and they seemed a little busy or disjointed to us. So we decided to pick one comic book character and only use strips from comics featuring that character. 

Once we decided on Superman, I went to a used bookstore and bought a bunch of cheap ($1 or less) Superman comic books. I had the kids cut out the strips, trying to focus on ones that featured Superman. 

We used a sanding tool to strip the wood surface for varnish and once that was done, we covered the entire surface with comic strips using Modge Podge (I let the kids do all of this on their own, and went back later and cleaned it up a later). 

Once the chair was dry, we applied a glossy varnish to seal it. We used a varnish that was designed to seal wood floors (because that's what a parent had donated) and we just brushed it on and made sure it was evenly distributed on the chair. 

Early on, the kids decided that we needed to paint part of the chair to break up the business of all the comic strips  and create a focal point. We painted the back of the chair red and added a large picture of Superman the kids found in one of the comic books. It looked super cool and sort of pulled the whole design together. 

All together I spent about $25 and a week of work to complete the chair. I could have gotten it done faster, but I wanted to kids to do most of the work, so it went a little slower than if I had been working alone.

I love how the chair turned out and I really want to do a few more chairs. I'd never done something like this, so I watched a few YouTube videos and easily was able to figure out how to accomplish the different steps of the project (sanding the wood, reapo

Cooper said he'd love an Incredible Hulk chair, so if I can collect enough Hulk comics, I'll make him one.