Dining table & chairs AFTER

It is done. And Britny keeps asking for pictures, so here they are.

Table Before:

Ugh. very ugly.


Table After:

Ooooohhh! Shiny! (dirty ugly lineoleum, though). I must admit I had some help with the table. I sanded the top, and assigned one table leg to each of my 4 oldest slaves children to sand. I don't recommend this approach, as I had to re-sand each one myself and remove someone's initials from one table leg (barbarians).

Chairs Before:

Okay, look again -- ugly dirty seat covers!

Chairs After:
LOVE IT! Hubby loves it too. Kids think I'm weird and should have done something "cooler." Like what? Screamapillar: "Anything except that. It just looks lame and old."

Thank you , dear, for your opinion. Now go away.

I picked the fabric (from my year's supply of textiles) because I have always loved it and didn't know what to make out of it. It's an upholstery fabric with Scotch Guard, even! Great for a woman with messy childern! I thought I had gotten it from my mother, but she said it was her mother's fabric -- making the fabric likely as old as the chairs. Way cool. or Vintage-y!

It wasn't hard at all to re-do the chairs, it helps TONS if you start off with an easy to disassemble chair with four screws like this:

I then watched Simpsons with Thing One and Luke Skywalker while we pulled off the old seatcovers, removing staples with a flat screwdriver (and occasionally stabbing ourselves in the palm in the process). 623 million staples later, we had just the wooden seat and the padding.

Recovering is just like gift wrapping: the corners are the tricky part.

Keep in mind, that with a chair like this one, the corners are never seen! So who cares what they look like!! (Except for me, I'm a super control freak and everything has to be as perfect as possible. If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well, right? My kids hate it when I say that.)

Okay, that's not a good one. The last one was the best one, but someone else had run off with my camera by then to take pictures of her car for her next blog entry (stay tuned for Karen's Millenium Falcon post!) so I couldn't take a picture of the PERFECT CORNER....which is now firmly screwed into a chair base. Oh well.

So here it is! Finished! but we had to keep the ugly pine bench there on the end for Eclair. It's her "spot" and she won't sit anywhere else. So it stays. Maybe I'll spray paint it to match the chairs. Not.

Oh yeah -- costs:

Table $40

Chairs $35

Wax & Stain $20

Staples & band-aids: $2.79

New dining room for under a hundred bucks. Score.

Linking to:

HodgePodge Life and Shabby Chic Cottage and Shabby Nest