Dining room upgrade: upcycling project from hell

When Adam and I moved in together I brought all the furniture.  He contributed a BBQ grill and a TV and that's about it.  Everything else was mine.  I was living in a one bedroom apartment before we started renting this house so you can imagine that my four-seater bar top table from Walmart wasn't exactly a functional item.  

Sold like hotcakes after 10 minutes on Craiglist!

For the holidays we purchased a folding table that seats 10.  Any other time we had guests we filled the four seats at the table and then the other two people sat at the island bar in the kitchen.  Clearly, this was less then ideal.  

After two years of musical chairs, we finally decided to search Craigslist for a better alternative.  We wanted something with the look of a farmhouse table but with a little more polish that seated at least 6 people.  We found exactly that. The table we purchased was originally from Baer's and with the two leafs can easily seat 10.  The down side was the 6 matching chairs were not only upholstered in ugly fabric but most of the leather seats were shredded.  So, enter in my latest hippie project: reupholstering dining chairs.

I didn't grow up in a house that had fabric chairs.  My mother was much too practical for that.  After seeing the mess the boys make while eating, I can't say that I blame her.  With that limited knowledge base, I did a lot of research on fabric.  I wanted something durable, in a good dirt color, that would be timeless (because I sure as hell didn't want to do this project EVER AGAIN).  I ended up going to Joann's with little hope that I would find what I was looking for.  I was pleasantly surprised by their selection and their prices.  I'm not sure if I got lucky with timing or they are always having sales but almost all of the fabrics in the store were discounted 50%.  I found a nice charcoal gray upholstery fabric that felt durable.  We bought 9 yards (which turned out to be WAY TOO MUCH fabric).

Here is what the chairs looked like before:

Two of the six chairs have arms.  All of them came with those obnoxious decorative nails that went all the way around the perimeter of the front, back, and seat of the chairs.  They needed to be removed one by one. With a bent tipped screw driver, a pair of angled needle nose pliers, blisters, bruises, curses, and hours of your life you'll never get back, the job was complete! There were so many of those bastard nails it filled a plastic grocery bag!

Needless to say, we did NOT use those EVIL nails on our reupholster! We ended up being able to salvage all the foam after removing the fabric/leather so the only thing in this project that wasn't recycled was the fabric (and the staples of course). The time and aggravation factor of the project all stemmed from the demolition.  

This is what we were left with once we removed the devil nails, the fabric, and the cushions:

Recovering the cushions was surprisingly easy.  Once we were done stapling all the fabric down we were left with the problem of reattaching them to the backs of the chairs.  The seats were screwed on with hardware, thank god.  Unfortunately, those devil nails were not only used for aesthetics.  They were the only thing holding the cushions onto the chair back.  We ended up using a heavy duty fabric glue that said it glues fabric to wood, metal, and various other surfaces.

 An hour or so of being clamped and the glue adhered nicely.  
(Side note: the glue also removes wood finish, so oops, we might need to invest in one of those scratch markers....)

Anyhow, after many hours, blood, sweat, and tears.....

The FINISHED PROJECT:

Looking at the end result you'd never know this was our first attempt at anything like this!  I want to thank Debra, Gary, and Adam for all their help in completing this incredibly labor intensive endeavor. After all the incidental purchases this overhaul cost about $200.  It would have been less if we didn't buy so much extra fabric. I doubt we would have been able to find six chairs that matched our table for that amount of money so all in all I say this was a win.  Now if you could just tell that to my blisters....