Re-covering kitchen chairs (photo-heavy)

After a good start on Sunday, I spent most of yesterday wishing my chairs were not in pieces so that I could ignore the re-covering project for another couple of years. I slept late, read for a couple of hours before getting up, made lunch, spent nearly an hour on the phone to my sister, did the dishes, burned baked a cake, read blogs, watched an hour or so of stuff on the internet, did the ironing and then made and ate dinner before I finally just accepted I was going to have to get going if I was going to have usable chairs any time soon.

All in all, I'd estimate this project took me about six or seven hours - about four or five of those spent taking the bloody staples out of the old covers, as the person who had these chairs before me had, it turned out, already re-covered them. Without taking the original covers off first. So each seat had two sets of covers to be divested of.

These are the offcuts from the cushions I had bought. Once they were cut down to size, I had just exactly enough for the width of the fourth chair and only had to trim a small amount from the length. So that worked out well. Time will tell whether that chair can stand up to regular use, I suppose.

I put the covering material down flat on the table (had washed, dried and ironed it beforehand). On top of that, there's a layer of cotton batting. Both of these are couple of inches bigger than the cushion, which is the next layer.

Next came the wooden seat - making sure that the stripes were lined up in the right direction so that the holes for the screws would be on the right sides when I wanted to re-attach the seat to the chair. Glad I remembered to do this. I stapled each side in the centre (first side done in this picture) before going round, pulling tight and filling in the gaps. I did corners as I went on two of the chairs and last on the other two. Had to cut out a corner of batting on all to ensure the layers weren't so thick nothing could get through.

My lines of staples were not by any means straight. Nor were my 'squares' of material really. But it's all hidden underneath and so it's all good. I am not at all the kind of perfectionist that would be bothered by what's out of sight. Well, I am, but only in my head - in reality, I'm so glad to get something finished I just don't care. So no tidying up the edges or cutting away excess material for me! Once all the material was stapled in place, I screwed the seat back into the chair.

Et voilà! Full marks for the superb photography on this one, non? Well, it was nearly nine o'clock and I was tired. I very nearly forgot to take any photos at all but I since I'm not planning on doing this again anytime in the next ten years or so, by then I'll be glad of the reminder of what to do.
I did try and make sure the stripes were straight and I think I did an alright job of that overall.

They went from this flat as a pancake, not comfy to sit on and dreary old style....

...to this. Brighter and more importantly, a bit of padding for comfort.