I bought my dining room table about 10 years ago. I didn't have children, or money. It was a small table with 4 chairs and I think I paid about $100. Quite a bargain! Over the course of the years the veneer chipped, bubbled and warped. The top of the table was uneven, stained and pretty unappealing. Also, I have two kids now. The smaller table wasn't working well for crafts, dinner and everything else that dining tables are used for. So I packed up hubby and monsters and headed to Lowe's where I found a very large piece of wood and some nice stain. I removed the old, ugly table top and screwed on the now stained wood. In no time I had a super-sized table!
But the chairs. They were falling apart. Literally. Pieces would break off, screws would fall out and I had to reattach the seats constantly. This poor table. I should just put it out of its misery and send it to the dump, but the thought of shopping for a new table does not fill my heart with glee. Instead I keep replacing, recovering and refinishing. I have twice before recovered the chairs and I think I have replaced every screw at least once in all 4 chairs. Through all that, I was now left with one original chair. I had this great plan to get 5 more chairs, all of various design, and recover them all with the same fabric, possibly even paint them. It would look eclectic and cute (I hoped).
Before I could find even one chair I wanted to refinish, let alone 5, the lone hold out from the original 4 dies. No chairs. My dining table has no chairs. How did this happen?! So I grabbed my younger brother and we set off to scour thrift stores in search of 6 similar, yet different chairs that I would then make look fabulous. We walked into the first thrift store and found 5 of these.
Hideous purple things that look like they belong on the patio of a Mexican restaurant where you pour your own soda. But I saw potential! And at just $5 a piece I was willing to give them a chance.
I removed the seat with a screw driver and laid it on some fabric like so:
Cut the fabric, making sure I had plenty to wrap all the around and simply starting stapling. I used a Stanley t100 staple gun, just $15 at WalMart. The fabric I had from previous projects, but I didn't have quite enough for all 5 so I had to use coordinating fabric on 2 chairs. Maybe not the eclectic look I had originally envisioned but I now have seating for 5 and what amounts to a whole new dining set for a grand total of: $50
