Here's A Story...

...About a million year old, hand me down, dining room set. Mark and I have a comically wobbly dining room set that were gifted to us when we got married. The wobbliest chair finally bit the dust, observe:
Mark's parents were moving and gifted us two of these:

Nice, huh? Too bad they looked like this together:

We might be poor college kids (still, ugh. Someday we'll be done, right?), but even I have some standards and this rag tag look was just not going to work for me. I suggested to Mark that we spray paint the furniture and recover the chairs. We've had bad luck with spray paint in the past but my friend Katy is always spray painting furniture and it always looks really great, so we thought we'd try it again. Mark was less than thrilled about my plan for his weekend until he realized that it meant a trip (or as it turned out, eight trips) to Home Depot. Mark could spend all day at Home Depot. I hate taking him there for a quick five minute trip because an hour later he'll still be staring at the grills and power tools.

Recovering the chair was the easy part. From left to right we have
1. The necessary tools including new foam, batting, fabric (I happened to have some waterproof fabric I'd bought to make bibs but turns out, it's not washing machine friendly so I was really happy to find another use for it), hammer, scissors and Mark's new toy, the super duper stapler. Totally worth the $16 investment.
2. Pull the seat off the chair and rip out the staples. Remove the old foam/fabric/etc.
3. I cut my foam to match the tapered shape of the chair (sorry these photos aren't very descriptive, I forgot to take pictures). Then I used some spray glue to mount the foam to the wood (not totally necessary, but handy to keep the foam from slipping while stretching the batting over it.
4. Pull the batting tight, staple like crazy and trim the excess. Repeat with fabric, make sure to center your fabric so the pattern looks straight.
5. Use some random fabric you have laying around the house to finish the back and cover all the raw edges. I just cut a piece a little bigger than the seat, fold over the edge and staple just overlapping the raw edges of your batting/fabric.
6. Viola! Put it back on the chair (unless you're spray painting everything first).

Mark and I ready to spray paint on our tiny patio. We look like graffiti artists about to go tag some street corner. Too bad we're not that cool.
Our empty canisters of paint. We greatly underestimated the amount of paint we were going to need (hence the eight trips to Home Depot...).

Want to see what our tiny patio looked like after using that much spray paint? Oops!
The finished product:I'm so happy with it! It was definitely worth the blood, sweat and trillions of brain cells lost to paint fumes (We did a lot of this project while Bennett was asleep with his air purifier on. You're welcome buddy.)

Now if I could just finish the two paintings and 1.5 million sewing projects I have going...