The Great Reupholstery Day!

I rolled out of bed Tuesday morning and hurried to the polls to vote.   (I can't believe Virginia is considered a swing state again after being so blue for so long!)  Then as soon as I was home, I carried all my dining room chairs down to the basement, grabbed Craig's drill, and began taking them apart.  I think I got one finished before the kids found me and wanted a turn with Daddy's power tools.

My "Before" shot.  Sort of like photographing a bruise, this picture really doesn't properly show just how dirty these poor chairs were...

It took about five minutes to pop those cushions off and I figured I was all ready for Adam to come!  But then I realized I also needed to take the cushions apart.  And it turned out that this meant removing HUNDREDS of staples from each chair.  HUNDREDS.  That was pretty much all Craig and I did for the rest of the day, was painstakingly pick staples out of each cushion.

The kids helped with that, too.  For about five minutes...

Adam arrived and got right to work on the one cushion I'd finished.  I tried to pick up my pace since he was clearly working much faster than I was!

He let the kids help, probably in an effort to slow down so I could try to catch up!

And we just worked like that all day!!!  At some point I took a break to give my aching hand a rest, and I cleaned the wooden frames of the chairs.  They had weird food dribbled down the sides of them so that needed to be fixed!  And Craig polished them, too.  And Adam did ALL of the actual reupholstering part!  I kind of thought I'd be sitting around watching him work (and feeling slightly guilty to not be helping more), I had no idea it would take me just as long to remove all the staples!  I think we finished around five, so I quickly threw some dinner together (I managed to have a side dish that Adam could eat, and Kendra had made banana bread for him the day before) and Craig set up the new cushions in the garage and scotch-guarded them.

And in case you think I was exaggerating about how dirty those original covers were:

Eeeeeeewwwwwww........

I was all set to screw the cushions back on the next morning, but I was really busy and then when I finally tried to do it in the afternoon, the screws were going in wonky and I got nervous and just made Craig do it while I was at book club.  I came home to these lovely chairs all ready to go:

It's hard to see, but the cushions have a little bit of blue in them, to go with my curtains.

I LOVE my new chairs so much!!!  Now I won't be embarrassed to invite people (like Adam and Allen!!!) over for dinner!  I need to hurry up and do that before my kids destroy these new ones..!