Up-Cycling Our Kitchen Nook

Over the past several months I've been looking at our table and chairs in our kitchen nook and thinking that I needed to update them.  Being the penny pincher I am, I knew we would be keeping them and just sprucing them up.  The table and the chairs are in perfect condition, so I didn't even think twice about replacing them with something new (like getting a wood table instead of keeping this outdated glass table, which is in our waaaay future).  

Jer and I bought this table over 5 years ago when we first moved into our house and we loved it at the time.  It fit perfect in our kitchen nook and was pretty cheap.  But over the years, the cushions had gotten a few stains so we knew eventually an easy fix would be to just re-cover the seat cushions.  Which leads us to this post.

When we decided to actually tackle this project, the best part for me was to pick out new fabric.  I.LOVE.FABRIC.  Oh yes.  If I could work in a fabric store all day and cut fabric for people that's what I would do.  Yeah, I know, why did I get a Biology degree?  I could have just gone straight into JoAnn's or Hancock and asked to be their "fabric cutter lady."  :)

Anyway....once I got the go ahead from my Mr. the search was on.  I went to numerous fabric stores and searched online and really couldn't find anything that I couldn't live without.   Until I entered Hancock fabrics.  I've never been in that store but I can tell you that I'll be going there for my next piece of fabric.  They have great fabric designs and a great selection.  That's where I found these two styles:

One is a solid pastel blue and the other has sort of a brick layered design that has pastel blue, light gray, dark gray and dark blue.

Here's a before picture of one of the chairs.

We decided to just fabric right over the old cushion so we didn't have to tear up the seat at all.  We measured our seat leaving about an inch of extra fabric all the way around to staple under the cushion.

Done!  Here's the corners.  Those were not the easiest to do.  For some reason, I'm terrible at doing corners.  But eventually I got'em done.  And I like'em (those are known Texan words).  :)

Here's a solid colored cushion.  Instead of doing all 4 chairs with the same fabric, I chose 2 different fabrics.  2 chairs would be re-done with the solid fabric and the other 2 would have the brick looking fabric.  Just so that it was SO match-y match-y.

The chairs were a sort of brown-greenish color.  And a little too dark.

So in order to lighten them up, I used Krylon (this time) spray paint in the color Nickel.

Here's one of the chairs with coat #1 very lightly painted.

You can see it's a little splotchy but that's okay because it would get 2 more coats.

Here she is all painted up with 3 coats on her.  She's a beauty!  If I were a paint color, I would want to be Nickel, too.  :)

So bright and elegant.

Here's what the underneath looked like after the cushions were bolted on.

Oh, and I didn't leave the table the same color.  Nope.  I actually painted it white (after I primed it).  Again, I didn't want the chairs and table to be too match-y match-y so I decided that the table needed to be a separate light color.  So white it was.

Here's the AFTER!  I just love it so much.  You notice I changed the curtains and took away the big ol' tree that was in the corner (which by the way, Jer absolutely disliked)?  

The curtains are actually two $7 drop cloth from Lowe's (I tell ya, I'm cheap) hung with clips and the tree found a new home in our dining room.  :)  

Doesn't that white just pop?!  Love it.

Oh and by the way, Boston' chair with his booster seat was (recently) covered in plastic that I got from Wal-Mart for 3 bucks.  We wouldn't want our sweet fabric getting messed up by the little man.

BEFORE 

AFTER

So what do you think?  Much better or no bueno?  Opinions are welcome!  :-)

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