Worth Waking the Little Stinker...

So, I have actually been doing a few really fun projects lately, but I will try to spread them out over the next few posts instead of combining them all into one. Where have I been lately, you might ask? Well, I am terribly embarrassed to admit  proud to say that I have been binge watching Pretty Little Liars. It has seriously consumed any spare time I have had lately. I finished the last episode that is available on Netflix, and was bored two minutes later. I was literally at a loss for what to do with my time. Well, the pictures I have been meaning to frame are now in their frames, and it is still a good 2 hours before I would normally go to sleep (yes, that is indeed how much time I spent watching the show every night, if not longer). So behold, I bring you this new post.

My husband and I got married a little over 5 years ago, and, as I am sure many of you know and can maybe relate to, we had little to no money, and had to be very careful (read frugal) with how we spent the little money we did have. When it came to buying furniture for our first apartment, we knew that getting a formal dining room set just wasn't in the budget. We headed to IKEA and literally furnished our entire apartment from that store. IKEA furniture isn't necessarily the cheapest way to go, but it was a good option for us at the time, and assembling the furniture with our friends the day we moved to New York is one of the first of many memories we made in our first home. So, while our IKEA dining room table and chairs have suited us just fine over these past 5 years, we haven't been as kind in return. There have been many drips, spills, and stains; it was time to recover the chairs.

After some searching around Pinterest, I decided that this was going to be an easy/fun project and that I was excited to get started! First thing I had to do was go to the fabric store and pick out a fabric that both my husband and I would agree on and would be a good fit for our dining room area. I headed out to JoAnn Fabrics and texted my husband pictures of 4 fabrics to choose from. I was so excited when he chose the one that was my favorite as well! (Though to be honest, I was going to choose that one regardless of what he said.) Unfortunately, the store didn't have enough of the fabric that I needed, but they were kind enough to order it in for me from another location...not gonna lie, I had a mini panick attack when there wasn't enough.

Ok, onto the good stuff...First, let me start by telling you that if you have a tendency to go on power trips, a staple gun might not be the best tool for you (insert evil laugh here). Secondly, did you know how LOUD staple guns are??? We did NOT! We started our project on the living room floor, and after the first two staples, moved the project over into the farthest corner of our bedroom in the hopes that we wouldn't wake Sam...fail (see title of post). Depending on your chairs, this project can be extremely easy. All we had to do was remove the seat portion of the chair by unscrewing the bottoms of the cushions. Then we needed to remove the old fabric. For us, that meant simply slipping off the old cover which was not stapled onto the chair, but was secured elastically (is that a word?). I believe the covers were made this way so that they could be easily removed, washed, and replaced. We didn't want to simply wash these though, we wanted to start over! Next, we laid the cushions out over the fabric so that we knew how much fabric we would need to cut for each chair. Then the cutting and stapling began. This was super fun, but also super frustrating!! Why couldn't my husband staple in the places I was asking? Or in a straight line? GGGRRRR

The hardest part about this project was figuring out the corners of the chairs. What I ended up doing was modeling after the matting that was stapled to the cushion already and tried mimicking those folds. This ended up helping a lot. Once we got into the groove of folding, tugging, yelling, huffing, puffing, and stapling, the project ended up being really simple and quick. I would say it probably took 1.5 hours total. Not too bad in my opinion.

After a quick 15 minute break to get Sam back to sleep, it was time to attach the cushions back onto the chairs. That took only a few more minutes, and then voilla! NEW CHAIRS! Most rewarding project yet!

All in all, my message to you is that revamping your chairs is really rather simple, and super fun! If you're looking for a way to spice up some old chairs, head on over to a fabric store and get excited! You'll soon have fun chairs too! Good luck, and happy stapling!!!

Pincerely yours,

Rachel