kitchen chairs

I don't normally like to toot my own horn, but TOOT TOOT is all I have to say about our kitchen chairs! We bought our table and chairs a meager 6 1/2 years ago. They survived the move from Utah to Florida with only minor damage. They survived the move from Florida to here with only a little more minor damage. Little by little, the fake leather has started to peel away. It doesn't help when little fingers see that the stuff is peeling off and they can't help but help with the shedding process. I thought that it would be so cool to be able to recover the chairs. But as we all know, I am less than handy and I just saw dollar signs as my trying to be handy and recover the chairs turned into us buying all new chairs because I totally destroyed the ones we had. Every day when I would see little pieces of fake leather on the kitchen floor I thought more and more about figuring out how to recover the chairs. I was talking about it whilst standing in a group of ladies from our ward one night. When I mentioned that I wished I knew how to do things like recover kitchen chairs, J perked up and said that she has in fact recovered some chairs before. She said that it was really easy. That the cushion of the chair screws on with little screws. All I would have to do is unscrew the cushions, buy material and using a staple gun, staple the material around the cushions and then screw them back onto the chair. She made it sound so easy but I know myself too well. I know that when I do things that should be easy, like add oil to the lawn mower, it never goes smoothly. What usually happens is I add too much oil and when I try to turn the lawn mower on the oil cap goes shooting skyward as the oil rains down on the grass, mower and me. Then we have to spend a good chunk of our day researching how to drain oil out of a lawn mower without the whole thing exploding. But who's talking about oil and lawn mowers? Let's talk about kitchen chairs. After J told me how to do it I went home and flipped our chairs over. No shocker, I didn't see any screws in the bottom of the chairs. A few weeks later J was over for something and I remembered to ask her about the chairs. She looked at them and after some deep investigation she found the screws. I played it cool and told her that I was sure I could recover the chairs now that the screws had been found. That night I said a quick prayer and turned the chair upside down. I prayed and unscrewed chairs and prayed some more. I called my mom to ask her how much material I should buy. She told me to find the area and double it. I did, but the answer told me that I needed something like 27 yards of material. Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but that seemed like way too much material. I did the next smartest thing I could think to do. I took one of the cushions with me to Jo Ann's where I met J and she led, guide and walked beside me as we put the material on the counter, put the cushion on the material and rolled it over to see how much it would take to cover one cushion. That scientific method told us that we didn't need near 27 yards, so we went with that way instead of my mom's way. Later that night J gave me a brief tutorial on how to do it. I took her staple gun and staples and went home. I'm not gonna lie, I was so nervous,I was sweating profusely.

These are the before pictures. This is what they looked like from each side. Poor sad little seats.

This is what they looked like when I was done! Not too bad for my first go around with covering chairs if you ask me! B was a huge help. He would hold the material tight while I used the staple gun. We're not expecting these chairs last through the millennium, but we wouldn't mind if they did!