Design in My Home Project: Recovering Our Dining Room Chairs

Recently, sweet hubs and I acquired a fantastic mid-century modern dining set from his mother for our new home. In addition to a dining table with a removable leaf and six chairs, the set also includes a beautiful credenza, which unfortunately won't fit in our small home's dining space, so that will be saved for the day we buy our first house.

The dining set is in pretty great shape, considering it's age and the fact that between it being used and it coming into our possession, it was living under a bed for a few years.  It needed a little love and was be back in fine condition in no time.

Hey look! It's the first interior reveal of the house:
the dining room, which we painted in Behr's "Desert Cactus"!

Our first step to bringing the set back to its former glory was to recover the chairs. We recently went on the hunt for fabric that would fit stylistically with it but also give it a little bit of a modern flair. Our search unveiled lots of gorgeous fabric in many styles, colors and textures - but we couldn't find something just right - it all seemed to be missing the most important thing on our search - our budget!  For those of you unfamiliar with purchasing fabric - yes, it can absolutely be an incredible solution to freshen up a piece of furniture or a room on a budget, but it can also get very expensive, very fast, especially when you have champagne taste (in fabric) as I do.

Anyhow, after lots of searching, both online and in-stores, in New York City as well as Atlanta, I came across a fabulous little website called Newtoto. It was perfect on several levels: reasonably priced, had lots of options for modern prints and most of them were heavy duty (ie. resists spills and tears - perfect for cats and messy eaters). They even allowed you to order free swatches. I picked out my top three favorites and three days later I had my swatches in hand.

(Fabrics Left to Right: "Network - Frost" Terratex Panel Fabric $7.50/yard, "Maxim - Sesame" Crypton® Jacquard $10.64/yard, "See Saw - Granite" Crypton® $6.50/yard)

And the winner was: See Saw in Graphite! It was absolutely perfect. The moment my grubby little fingertips touched its thick, beautiful texture I was in love. Yes, I fall in love easily, especially when wonderful textures are involved.

But I digress... I got online and ordered my fabric immediately.

Fast forward to 5 business days later...

The day that our delivery was scheduled to arrive, sweet hubs and I ventured to Hancock Fabrics and our luck was with us - they were having a 40% off sale on foam! We walked out of there with four pieces of foam to start recovering our chairs as soon as our shipment arrived that evening.

And once we got home, our fabric was at our door. We then began recovering.

This was what we started with:

The chair before, which was covered in a red vinyl
that just didn't match our color scheme at all.

Sweet hubs and I then disassembled the first chair (unscrewed the seat from the frame) and took off not one, but two layers of different fabric and multiple layers of batting and foam - some of which I'm sure was from 1970 - and removed all of the staples left from the previous recovers.

Sweet hubs removing staples.

After removing the staples, we cut the foam to the size of the board. Once that was done, we cut the fabric. I don't know about anyone else, but I always get so nervous making "the first cut". Be it wrapping paper, fabric or cake, I'm always nervous that I'll mess it up.

Sitting on my knees, taking a deep breath before cutting the fabric.
Very dramatic, I know.

Once the fabric was cut, next was stretching the fabric over the foam and board and stapling it to the back. It's not nearly as difficult as it sounds - you just have to be careful to make sure you eliminate ripples and whatnot on the corners when you're stapling. And stretch the fabric tight. You want it to be nice and smooth. (I failed to capture any photos of the starting point since we were both doing this at the same time, but when you're doing this, your fabric is on bottom with the correct side (the side you want showing) down on flat on a surface. You stack the foam and then the board on top. When stretching and stapling, you want to start with one side, then do the side opposite of that, and so on. It keeps the fabric taught.

This is what it should look like mid-way through (keep in mind we had a little too much fabric left over, hence sweet hubs trimming it):

After you finish, you simply place the cushion back on the frame and screw it back on.  Voila!

I'm not going to lie - this was my first time recovering a chair. It was surprisingly easy, once we figured out the logistics. And when I say we, I mean that after the first chair, sweet hubs decided that he enjoyed recovering that first chair so much that he actually took over the project and finished the rest of them solo.

I'm a lucky lady. I'm even luckier because now I have a rad dining set.

That's all for now folks!

Design in My Home: Colors in the New House

Well, the move to Atlanta from Brooklyn is complete. We've been here almost two weeks now and things are going swimmingly. We're settling in, getting familiar with our new neighborhood and catching up with old friends.

All of that aside, I've been asked numerous times now what my color palette is for the new house and I'm finally ready to share.

I must admit, in my home, I resist a lot of variety when it comes to my color palettes - I gravitate toward cooler colors, as does sweet hubs, which means we typically stay in the neutrals (mainly shades of grey or cooler browns), blues and greens. Guess what? We didn't stray from that here either.

In our last apartment, we went with more conservative, dusky colored blues and greens. You can see what I'm talking about here. This time, we felt since we were actually going to be in a house rather than an apartment, that we'd go a little more bold - instead of dusky, we went jewel toned.

Now, without further adieu, our color palette:

As you can see, I chose Behr colors - I also used Behr paint. I really do find them to have excellent quality paint with great coverage (No, I'm not paid to say that, I truly do just love their products.)

I'm not telling you where which colors are going or what they're doing - just soak up the color palette for a bit and relax. After I saw the colors we picked all together, I realized its almost a Palm Springs color palette. Good thing most of our furniture is modern and mid-century - they go hand in hand in the Palm Springs style.

Well, that's all you get for now. I'll have another "Design in My Home" update soon!