New Chairs Kind of!

Brenden and I now have a working computer (many, MANY, thanks to Dad McQuay) which means I recently uploaded a bunch of our pictures from the last few months of our lives. This means we can share some of those pictures and experiences with you. I suppose we could've always shared those experiences with you minus the pictures but it's so much easier to be lazy in blogging when you have a decent pseudo-excuse (e.g., no pictures.) I need to stop apologizing about not blogging more often. It's getting on my nerves and I'm sure yours too right? I know you're thinking, "JUST GET TO THE BLOG POST ALREADY" or maybe you're not. Maybe now that I've said that you're thinking it but before you weren't and now I've planted thoughts of annoyance towards me in your head and my entire efforts at trying to make you think we're maybe cool a little bit are now in vain. Anyway, time to redeem myself!

NEW CHAIRS...kind of

Brenden and I inherited a set of three lovely chairs from my parents. I don't think anyone knows what happened to the fourth chair but we don't have it and my parents don't have it and it may not even exist anymore.

It's a pretty, sturdy, nice chair. (The other two look the same.)
The fabric on the seats isn't really our style. It's a little more formal and fancy than we'd like and the color actually blends into our carpet so it makes the dining area really tan and bland (our dining area is carpeted.) We wanted to give that area a little more personality and, though we have some ideas for bigger projects fluttering around in our heads, we figured we could do a simple fix to bring some of our personality and color into that space.

We looked up a few DIY reupholstering videos online and after we felt comfortable enough to tackle this simple project we set out to JoAnn's to look at fabrics. After much deliberation, we decided on this lovely pattern (found here):

We bought the fabric on sale and since we only had three chairs, we didn't need a ton of yardage. We cut the fabric into the sizes we needed and got to work.

We wanted to keep this project as simple as possible. The chair padding was still good so we didn't replace it and we just stapled the new fabric right over the old fabric.

(Quick side-note about that blue corner shelf in the background of the first picture: We have no idea how to decorate it. We put stuff on there when we moved here that we never meant to keep there permanently at all but those items have stayed there since the day we placed them there. We have two pictures, an empty picture frame, Brenden's old, lumpy (but beautiful, Brenden, really!) pottery projects from when he was a kid, and a large white pitcher. Ideas for decoration anyone?)

We repeated the stapling process with the other two remaining seats, screwed the seats back onto the chairs, and there you have it:

New chairs kind of

To compare the before and after:

We really like how the bright green brings out more of the cherry color of the wood. If we ever get around to beginning/finishing other projects, we'll share those on here too.

One more picture. This is a picture of Brenden with the cardboard tube the fabric came on (we had to special order it and the extra shipping fee bought us a huge cardboard tube!) After we unrolled the fabric, I had to beg Brenden to please remember we were working on a project because he wouldn't stop playing with the tube of cardboard. It was pretty funny and I think I had a brief real-life glimpse into what it was like to raise Brenden as a child. I think he figured out all of the noises you could possibly make with that piece of cardboard.