Life on Purpose: Recovering Grandma's chairs

So I told you about wanting to recover the dinning room chairs from the set I received from my grandma. It took me about a week to get them finished! It felt like forever!

First off I had to remove the plastic covers and then I chose to remove the first layer of fabric too (there was actually 2 layers of fabric, when my g-ma recovered them last time she just added the new one over the old. I think this helped with extra padding and less work).

This sounds like an easy thing to do but it wasn't. The fabric was stapled onto the wood (chair bottoms) and then she added the plastic and stapled the snot out of the plastic. But the worst part was that the staples were embedded into the plastic/fabric. There was no way I could get under the staples to yank them out.

So, I got some pliers and used them to grab onto the loose plastic/fabric and yank, which caused the staples to pull out. Oh and I had to sit on the floor and brace the seat (removed from the chair) with both of my feet and yank. It was hard work. After the 3rd chair my darling husband decided to try to find a better way, which after a few failed ideas turned into him helping by doing all the plastic/fabric removal for the other 3 chairs. I was very grateful!

After cleaning up all the loose staples and hammering some back in I stapled the new fabric onto the seats. And yes I stapled the snot out of it too! I am my g-ma's granddaughter!

I'd measured and cut the fabric a couple of weeks ago so this made the actual recovering part much faster and easier. Here's the fabric again.

In real life the fabric is a bit bolder.

And here's the finished chairs.

I also want to refinish/paint the table and chairs and thought I knew what I wanted to do, but sometimes you have to wait and see how part 1 looks before you commit to part 2. After seeing the fabric on the chairs my original plans went out the window. Right now I'm thinking I want to refinish the table to a much darker stain and paint the chairs (there is no way on earth I want to strip and stain those chairs) but I don't know what color exactly yet.

So since I'm not sure what I want to do, I'm waiting. And frankly right now I just don't want to take on a project that big. I will in the future when it starts to bug the snot out of me (apparently I have a lot of snot...) But for now I'm happy that at least the fabric is up to date, lighter and fresher, and that our legs don't stick to the chairs anymore.

AND about how well they stand up to kiddos. I bought outdoor fabric so I felt better about not reinstalling the plastic. Well the day after I finished the last chair our friends the "K's" came over and their 4yr old and Trey had chocolate ice cream at the table. The next morning I found their drips on the seats. I took a wet rag and started scrubbing and everything came up easily! I was so excited! It's the little things!

Ok one last before and after.