Kitchen chair redo

The people who sold us this house graciously left us a few pieces of furniture.  The kitchen table and chairs are one of the things they left us.  While functional they needed updating.  The first thing I decided to do was to recover the cushions.  Next I will be replacing the rollers as these are old and squeak and don't roll well.
I took a few pictures of the chairs as I was recovering them.  I forgot to take a picture of the actual recovering process but I will try to explain what I did.

The first thing I did was measure the chair seat front to back and side to side, I also measured down and around to the bottom both ways.  I figured I needed about 30 inches by 30 inches of fabric for each chair.  This would give me plenty of fabric to fold around and down under and staple.  The home DEC fabric came in 60 inch width so I bought 60 inches.  When I got home I cut the piece of fabric into four pieces.

This is what the chairs looked like when I began.

Flip the chair over and remove all screws that are holding the seat onto the frame of the chair. Take the seat off the chair and lay on your fabric which you have spread out onto your kitchen table.  My chairs had a flat or even side which was the front so I folded the fabric under and stapled along the even edge trying to keep the fabric even.  Next I turned the whole thing around and stapled the other side which would be the back of the chair or where it meets the back of the seat.  I pleated, stapled and so on from the middle out.  Then I did the same thing to the sides.  Don't be afraid to use plenty of staples.  Mollie took the old seats off and put the new seats on while Hannah and I recovered them with the new fabric.

Screw the newly covered chair pad back onto the chair. 

Then you end up with new chair pads.  They make the whole chair look so much better and cost me less than $15.00.  I forgot to mention that the main reason I recovered the chairs was because the old compressed wood of one of the seats broke, so we took that chair pad completely apart and traced the seat onto new plywood, cut it out with a jig saw and used that new piece of wood to recover and make the new seat from.  I used the old padding that was already on the chairs.  The other three chairs I did not take apart and just put the new fabric over the existing fabric.  If they had been badly stained or torn up I would of taken the old fabric off and replaced the foam as well.  Since mine were not torn or stained just old I just covered over them.

We have a dinningroom table and hutch

Every time I have found a piece of furniture on Craigslist and called about it, made an appointment to go look and buy it I get a text that it is sold.  The only thing I have been able to buy is the German Shrunk. 
I noticed a used furniture store in town so I stopped to check it out.  They had a very large dinning room table and 6 chairs and a matching hutch.  The price was right so I told Jeff and the girls about it.  The girls and I drove back to town today in the pick up and after the girls saw the set they thought it was worth the asking price so we bought it, loaded it up and brought it home.  I was able to unpack some of my pretty glass things to put in the hutch.  Once we get the German Shrunk put back together I will have lots more places to put the pretties.  I downsized quite a bit on them but some of them were things I wanted to keep.
This is the table, chairs and hutch set up in our new dinning room.

There were only 6 chairs but there is plenty of room for at least two more chairs.  I will be on the look out for two chairs that are similar to the ones in the set.  I am sure I will not be able to find some that match exactly but if I can find some that are similar I can place them in the middle with the others on the outsides I think it will work just fine.  I do want to buy a nicer table cloth.  This is one I found in some things headed to someones dumpster.
We plan to go to a furniture store to look for living room furniture.  I am not in a big rush so I can take my time and find the furniture that will look nice and that we like.

German shrunk or schrunk

I mentioned the other day that I wanted to buy some furniture off craigslist.  Well it turned out that every time I made appointments to see furniture they would text me and tell me that it had sold.  That is all but the German shrunk that I wanted.  I text ed several times and the lady said the ad was about to run out and she was not going to renew it and that she would save it for me.  Its a few hours away so its not like we can just jump in the pick up and run over to get it so I am thankful she is so willing to wait.  We will try to get there Monday or Tuesday and rent a uhaul when we get there.
One dear friend had never heard of a shrunk so I asked the seller to send me pictures since the craigslist ad was no more and here they are.  Oh and I had never heard of one either until my sister got one and was talking about them.  Anyway here are pictures of the shrunk I am buying.

The top picture makes the shrunk appear darker than it really is.  These pieces come from Germany and were brought over mostly by service men.  They come apart in several pieces so they are easier to transport.  The problem is the service men pay several thousand dollars for these shrunks and then when they get to the states they discover that the homes here usually don't have enough wall space to allow them to be set up.  I happen to have just the place for this one.  Granted it it will take up one entire wall but it will look beautiful.  Of course we wont have the bar part set up as we don't drink but it can be used for other things.  I am quite excited to purchase this first piece of furniture for our new home. This piece is something like 9 feet tall by over 9 feet wide and about 2 feet deep at the deepest part which is the bottom piece which by the way is the largest piece of all.

My dream staircase