Sunday, August 7, 2011

Another Bench Makeover


When we purchased our dining room table, chairs and hutch we also noticed a two-person bench that matched the chairs.  We didn't get it then because we felt we had just about met our maximum spending limit that weekend.  But.....a few weeks later and after we'd calmed down a bit about our big purchase (our largest ever on furniture) we thought we really should have gotten it.  I called the store and was told our design had been discontinued but we could have the floor model at a reduced price. Woo-hoo! The only drawback was that unlike our chairs we couldn't pick the finish or fabric. Fortunately the finish matched but we didn't care for the bright red patterned fabric:

We've lived with it for a couple of years like this with every intention of recovering.  A few weeks ago I was in a fabric store and the P. Kaufmann fabric (above) was discontinued to $5.99 a yard.  Nice.  It was perfect with my color scheme and it was upholstery grade.  So, finally I did my redo.
After recovering the bench I had quite a bit of fabric left, so I decided to recover the arm chairs to tie in it.


I hadn't been looking for fabric for this project that day, it just happened to be there and at a great price so I took it as a sign since we're phasing out the red accents in our home anyway. Just meant to be!
I tried to take pictures of the process when I had a serious camera malfunction (better than a wardrobe malfunction I guess!) but it was incredibly easy.  Just unscrewed the seats from underneath and tightly wrapped the new fabric right over the old and stapled down with a staple gun.  My only hiccup was that a couple of the screws had been stripped so I had to wait for my handy hubby to use some specialty tool to get them out.
For the price and time and effort investment I couldn't be happier.