begging to be brown

Part Two of the dining room makeover involves these chairs that sparked the entire dining room makeover. Once I saw their legs that couldn't make up their mind (am I dressy or am I casual?) with the different set of  front and back legs I knew they would be the perfect chairs to tie our mismatched set together. As I mentioned yesterday, I paid for these chairs with a baggie filled with dimes. I basically ran away from the house hosting the yard sale in embarrassment once I realized the sellers weren't there and I had to just leave a bag of dimes on their stoop... I felt like those kids that leave a pile of dog poop on your doorstep and then run away.

I sanded down the entire chair. It was a fun experience, oh wait, no it wasn't. It took me two hours and it was tedious to get into those cracks on the front legs.

As you can see in this next pic I wasn't able to get all the black paint off the chair, but it lends a sort of textured look that I'm digging... but I'm not sure how I feel about it next to the IKEA chair legs which look lighter in comparison... I'll show those off in the "reveal" post for the completed dining room set. 

I ripped the old country-ish fabric off the cushion and purchased some new stuff to match our rug from Joann Fabrics for 40% off the $10.99 / yard price. I had to get a yard and a half to do the two cushions.

I also purchased a chair pad cover at Joann's because whoever owned the chairs before thought it didn't matter to have the foam go all the way to the edge of the wood base. Wrong. Unless you want to be sliding onto a wood base. I didn't realize this until I undid the chair pads so this was an unfortunate expense (well, it was only $11 but still). So you take your chair pad foam, cut it to fit the wood base, and then fold and tuck and staple. Note to self: don't try to staple while your son is sleeping, it will ruin a good thing.

Here is the finished product... the second chair will hopefully be done tomorrow, it's just hard to finish it all and make sure I'm not being a mom someone will report to DSS for abandoning her child while she refinishes a chair. While Drew and I were outside working I noticed that he'd start to lose it sometimes and I had to just say to myself: "Finish it later, Jen. This stupid chair will always be there but you never want to regret that you didn't love on Drew enough because you wanted to check things off your to do list." Any other moms struggle with that?