Recovering My Kitchen Chairs

We bought these kitchen chairs 8 years ago and after three children having three meals a day and lots of spills and other accidents, they now look like this:

I can't believe they look this bad!  And....what you can't see from the photo is how gross and stained they are...or maybe you can! (I'm also a little bit horrified to notice the finger prints and smudges on the little t.v. in the background.  I'll grab the glass cleaner in a minute.)

I had wanted to cover the chairs with this red material.

Unbelievably, in the 36 hours that it took me to decide if I liked it in the kitchen, some decorator bought the whole bolt of the fabric!  Apparently she wants to use the fabric on chairs in a restaurant.

 

So....that's not happening.  My husband and I went to another fabric store about an hour away. We discussed bringing home just a sample (that would have been the smart thing to do, in retrospect), but we didn't want to miss out again, so we bought enough of this material to recover the chairs.

 I don't want to tell you how much it cost!  Would you believe, it's just not right.

Can you tell I'm really new at this whole picture taking for the purposes of blogging thing?  Don't answer that!

Anyway, the problem with this fabric is that it's just too muted for the kitchen- even though it is lovely.  I am looking for something that is more vibrant.  This story will continue next weekend after my husband and I visit another fabric store.  I've got my fingers crossed.

In the mean time,  I think there are about a thousand staples per chair seat that need to be removed before this whole upholstery event can occur.

I also need to find a new use for a few yards of oops fabric!