Mike and I have needed new dining chairs forever. The only problem is that most of the ones we liked were $250 each (who has the money for that?). So after checking out a few blog tutorials, we thought we'd try our hand in redoing some old ones we found on craigslist.
We used these Pottery Barn chairs as our inspiration.
Here are the chairs we found off craigslist for $75. We thought we would just have to put new fabric on (cheaper redo), but the foam inside was so bad we had to redo the entire seat (more $). We recommend anyone doing this project to inspect the foam better before you buy the chairs! But actually we learned a lot, and had fun stapling on all the foam. Now these seats are going to last another 15 years.
During the process:
We (aka Mike) spray painted the chairs with Krylon's Ivory. Picking the fabric was a bit harder.
We knew we wanted a fabric that was green and white, and ended up getting two types from fabric.com (and returned the one we didn't like). Both fabrics were Waverly Sun N Shade, which is an outdoor fabric that is Teflon-coated, breathable, holds up to harsh sunlight, and resists mold, mildew, soil and stains. I found them for about $7 a yard.
Here is the final product.
In this last picture you can see our old black Ikea chairs against the window (what do we do with them now?).
Lastly, we will put a finishing wax on and screw the seats in, and soon we'll have a new dining room.
Abby's first shower when she was preggers with Jackson was such a bummer (we didn't know her then) so we got together to have a real baby shower for her with all the dumb and silly baby shower games (including the smell the candy bar smooshed in the diaper game--her request).
It took about ten people behind the camera to get Andrew to smile like that (above). The rest of the time he looked like this (below). I am pretty sure that was due to the jet lag and lack of proper nap.
Here is a Featherstone (Mike's brother Scott) and a Smith (Alex's sister) gathering up all the gifts at the end of the night.
Today we finally changed the knobs and added it to Andrew's room (see below). It is such an improvement from his previous dresser. He was using a broken one from Kmart that Mike had from his bachelor days.
The pictures from my iPhone aren't fabulous, but the blue color is actually really cool in person. We are happy to finally be finished with Andrew's room--until the next baby comes!
Mike & I have been using Ikea tables as nightstands for almost four years now, so I figured nightstands would be a good place to start. I found the above nightstands at Goodwill for $6 each.
First I primed them (no sanding needed according to this tutorial). The trick here is to prime them with a tinted gray since I was planning on painting them a darker color.
I went through several sets of drawer pulls (I was looking for ring pulls which are hard to find--first I ordered some online but they were the wrong color, then I went to a specialty hardware store but those weren't quite right either). I finally gave up on the ring pull idea and ended up with these ovals for $3 at Home Depot.
During the process:
I needed a bigger piece of artwork for the dresser (below), but my challenge was how do I do it for free and in less than 15 minutes? I also wanted to do something Mike would love seeing every morning.
