I think I'll keep my day job... DIY chair recovering

Most of my friends know that I love me some Craigslist.  I search the same terms every day and sometimes I find awesome things priced much less than they're worth.  When N and I bought a new dining room table, I looked at lots of beautiful chairs and the ones I want are far beyond my reach right now...

Crate and Barrel, Sasha, $399 each

Rather than spend a lot of money on some chairs I kinda like, I decided to look for a cheap solution on Craigslist that will serve our needs until I can get what I want (one day).  Enter four antique chairs from England priced at $25 each.  The lines are really classic, but not overly fussy, and they look pretty cool next to our espresso colored table.  However, the seats were a wreck.  The old leather was cracked and ripped and I began searching for the right fabric to recover them (and wrote this post about it). After spending entirely too much time looking at swatches and trying to balance the fabric with the rug and potential wallpaper, I decided that simple is better. 

I found some robin's egg blue outdoor fabric for $6.99 per yard online and set about recovering the seats with some help from N on Saturday morning.  It was not easy stripping 70+ year old leather off of the seats and pulling out at least 100 tiny little nails, but my husband is pretty handy and finished three seats in the time it took me to pull the nails out of one.  I found 4 pre-cut chair cushions made of 1 in high density foam at JoAnn's Fabric and used an exacto knife to cut them to fit.  Then, I just used N's staple gun and attached the fabric to the frame of the seats.  I pulled it too tight on the first one, and the second was a little bumpy on the edges, but I got the hang of it and now I'm proud of my handy work

Nobody is going to mistake this for a professional job, but none of my friends get on their knees to inspect chair cushions and for a total cost of $135, I am pretty happy with the end result.