Dining Table and Chairs Redo

One of our many projects going on at the moment was is the redo of our new dining table and chairs. Before I get into that, let me show you what our dining room looked like when we bought the house.

Horrible. Horrible. Horrible. Anyways, we changed the paint color and tore the carpet out right away. And for the almost 4 years that we have lived in our house, we've been using a borrowed dining table and folding chairs that we bought at Walmart (plus one chair that we refinished). Beautiful, right?

We decided it was about time to have some real furniture in our dining room and our friend happened to be selling a set that was in his storage unit that we fell in love with. It needed some major work, but we ended up buying the table and 6 matching chairs anyway. The table and 2 of the chairs got done pretty quickly, but then we started other projects and the rest of the chairs got pushed to the back burner.

Today, I am pleased to say that we have 3 chairs completely finished (plus the one that was already done from the above picture... only 3 left!) and no more folding chairs in our dining room! Take a look at the before and after.

The poor thing obviously needed some help. It had a huge stain on the corner, which we assumed was a burn stain, multiple water marks, scuffed edges, etc. So my husband's job was to sand and stain the top of the table to make it look new again. I think he did an exceptional job! We stained the top a dark walnut and painted the bottom an off-white. No more rough edges, water marks, or burn! 

(Also, note the cool pull-out part of the table! It slides down and under when you don't need it.)

And then there were the chairs... we looooved the lines on the chairs (except for the painting the curves and cracks part). They were definitely scuffed and beaten-up looking. And there was an olive-green vinyl seat covering that was just not working for me. So, I painted the chairs white to match the table and re-upholstered the seat cushions in a pretty linen paisley fabric that compliments the already-completed chair. 

One other thing about the chair re-upholstery: if you need to add cushion to the seat pad, but don't want to spend an arm and a leg, buy a foam egg-crate that goes on a twin bed, cut it up and use that for padding. I bought 2 egg crates from Walmart for under $10 each and double layered the seat cushions (I like a lot of padding) for all 6 chairs. I spent WAY less than if I would have bought seat pads at a craft store.

And there you have it! What do you think of our new (almost complete) dining set?

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