Recovering dining room chairs

I recovered my dining room chairs! In case all my loyal readers hadn't noticed, I'm in the process of decorating my kitchen. :) Friday, I went to run some errands and decided to stop by the fabric store. I found some red material that matched the curtains. I decided to buy some and use it to recover my chairs. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but hadn't decided for sure if I wanted to do red on the chairs or another color. I wasn't really planning on doing this the same day, but once I realized how easy it would be, I sent Dan to Lowes to get a staple gun and away I went!

Before.

These chairs were given to me. I didn't choose this striped material.

After!

The flash made the material lighter in color. It is more of a wine red.

It wasn't extremely hard to recover them, it just took a few hours. Dan helped me on the first one, but after that, I was on my own. :) The hardest part is the corners and trying to make it smooth and not have a lot of creases. I didn't take off the old material, I just put the new material straight over it. Honestly, the hardest part of this whole thing was screwing the seats back on! For some reason, these chairs are different than most. The screws go in the sides of the chair, not a little piece of wood that is laid diagonal in the corners. It was SO hard to try and find the screw holes.

Anyways, I think it turned out well for my first time. Our next project is to stain the chairs darker, paint the legs of our table black, and stain and refinish the top of the table to match the chairs. I also bought more curtains for the other 2 kitchen windows. I'm going to have to do some hemming and sewing to make them fit because I had to buy the larger size curtains. Then, after we do all of the above, our kitchen will be finished!!! Well, pretty much. There are always more finishing touches, but at least the big stuff will be done.

Also, for those of you in CA, I bought the material at Home Fabrics. It's by Toys R Us on K and 15th. They sell material for SOOOOO cheap! I bought this nice material for $6.99 a yard. This probably would have cost me anywhere from $20-$30 a yard at Joannes. In fact, I've seen the same kinds of material at both places. So basically it cost me $2.60 per chair. Not a bad deal. If you need material, go there first. A lot of times they have material for $3-$5 a yard. It's nice stuff too, not cheap stuff. They just get it for the whole sale price.