Bringing My Dining Room Out of the 90s

Or out of the 70s? I don't know....exactly when was beige fabric printed with small music notes and square dancing calls ("Do-si-do!" "Promenade your partner!") hip? The story of how our dining room set came to be ours is kind of an odd one, so I'll give you the short version: It's 1998, we just got married 2 months ago, and we're moving into our very own home! It's the start of the school year, and I mention our new house to one of my co-workers because I know we live in his neighborhood. He's a very nice man in his mid-50s, and he says, "Do you guys need any furniture? We're cleaning out my mom's house because she just died. Come on over after school and you can take a look at what we have left."

Since I have a personal policy of never turning down a guy's dead mom's furniture, we drive out to her house after school that day. He gives us his mom's dining room set, a twin bed, a giant ladder, a dehumidifier, and probably a couple other things I'm forgetting. He won't take any money for it, so to show him my gratitude, I bake him an apple pie next day. He smiles and thanks me, then puts it on the table in the teacher's lounge to share...later someone told me it was because he'll go into anaphylactic shock from one of the pie ingredients (was there nuts in the pie? I can't remember what he was allergic to.) So anyway, kinda an odd way to aquire furniture, but it's served us well!

The chair seats, however were totally worn out when we got it. I set out immediately to find fabric to recover them. And for some reason, I liked the beige square dancing stuff. (In my defense, the words are very faint and you wouldn't necessarily take the time to read them if you were just sitting down to eat!)

A couple weeks ago, I was out at Hobby Lobby and saw some fabric I just loved. I stood there trying to figure out what I should make with it. It was a heavier cotton fabric and I decided it would be just the thing for our dining room chairs. Partially because our chairs were getting so ghetto again from years of use, and partially because the colors were perfect. Our dining room sits right between our kitchen, which has walls same color as the blue in this fabric, and our family room, which has a lot of espresso brown furniture. So this was the perfect fabric to tie it all together.

I feel a little silly explaining how to recover a chair, because it really is pretty self-explanatory, but since this is a craft blog, I'll go for it.

First, unscrew the chair seat from the frame, then pry out the old staples. Take off the old fabric and toss it, but you might save the old padding and just put new stuff on top of it for a little extra fluff.