Dining Room: Chairs

I meant to make this post forever ago, but had the pictures on my phone and kept forgetting to put them on my computer. Better late than never I guess.

I still don't have a full dining room update as I'm waiting until we hang our pictures up, but here's a taste of some of what we've done. To see the "before" and the "during" click here and here.

When we got married, Steve's grandfather refinished a dining room table that was his parents' and his grandparents' before them and gave it to us as a wedding gift. I LOVE it! It's a dark mahogany table with two leaves. The feet are metal, bronze I guess. Overall it's just gorgeous.

Unfortunately, we had no chairs to match it. When we first got married, my Oma bought me chairs at a yard sale. Actually, she bought bar stools, and my dad cut them down to chair size. There were three of them. So when we moved into the house, I was desperate for matching chairs. Steve and I combed yard sales and came up with nothing. Until my friend Karen told me that she had a set of six mahogany chairs that were her grandmothers sitting in her attack, unused. They just weren't her style. Being the amazing woman that she is, she gave them to us for free!

They needed a bit of work. Actually they still do as some of the veneer on the detailing is coming off, but we can easily fix that. The biggest thing that needed to be done was reupholster the seats.

You can't see very well in the picture--it's from my cell--but they were stained and faded. Karen said they were last upholstered in the 40s I think.


So I stripped it all off and saved as many of the upholstery tacks as possible. Steve and I picked out a fabric that is kind of the revers pattern as our dining room rug with the colors we have carried throughout out our kitchen and dining room; teal/turquoise, green, and brown. I upholstered all six chairs myself using a combination of the old upholstery tacks and a staple gun. I'm sure it's not done totally correctly, but it looks pretty good if you ask me.

Here's how it looks in the dining room, which again isn't done, and again this is a crappy cell phone picture.

I'm really happy with it. It's pretty much my favorite room in the house, especially because of the area around the corner to the left, which I'll show you in a another post sometime.