chairs recovered

A few weeks ago, I snagged a pair of cool old chairs off of craigslist for a whopping $15 each.  To describe them in one word: yikes.  The wood was in good condition, but the seat covers… mmm… not so much.  I think the one on the left looks like the ’80s threw up on it.

So I cleaned ’em up and swapped out the seat covers.  There were about 5 layers of fabric under the top layers of these, and it was getting a bit bulky, so I removed every. single. layer.  Then, I put the underlying chair pads in the dryer for 30 min on high to fluff them up and kill anything that might be growing in there (shudder).  Jason made fun of me for that step, but I find that the trick to buying old stuff is making myself feel like I’ve erased any bugs/germs/misc that previous owners may have left on there.  Ahh… neuroses.

Anyways, I took pictures of all of these steps, but decided that there are millions of tutorials on the interwebs for these things, and my version is no different: staple, pull tight, staple, pull tight.  You know the routine.

I bought this floral brocade a million years ago to make throw pillows and never followed through on it.  And I love how it looks on the chair!  See?  Sometimes it’s a good thing I take on too many projects and don’t finish all of them!

Believe it or not, this is my first attempt at recovering chairs.  It was easy peasy!  And, they look fab in our new dining room.

And, did you notice!?  I added shades to my painted chandelier, as you suggested (thanks!).  I think it looks swell.  Much better than the original!

brassy and glassy before

much more classy after

One more pretty shot of the chandelier: