Recovery

I never quite got around to posting this over the holidays, but I saw the pictures tonight and thought I would do it.

It turns out sometimes I do unplug from my computer. I actually try to do it as often as possible (although not as often as I might like, especially during the arctic winter). I make a habit to only check once in the morning and before bed on weekends, and I try not to use it at all during the night while I am home with the kids.

I'm very glad when I find new tasks to try and do that aren't computer-related also. Expanding my knowledge of varied other topics is very refreshing.

When we moved into our current house, we bought a new dining set that happened to come with upholstered chairs. At the time we knew that probably wouldn't mix well with our kids, but the set works really well with our house. Less than 2 years later, the seats were completely trashed and looked horrible.

Since I like new challenges, and I don't like money coming out of my wallet, I convinced my wife that her idea of recovering the chairs was a good one, but I should do it myself. I kept saying I would eventually do it, but then she used the fact that we were hosting Christmas dinner as a reason I should speed up the process. Couple that with my nearly 3 week vacation from work, and I made it happen.

In reality, it only took me 2 nights to get all 6 chairs recovered. I needed very few tools and things to make it happen. I borrowed an electric staple gun, bought a nice pair of scissors for cutting the fabric, and some very nice leather-like fabric from a local fabric store.

Here is a gallery of some before and after pictures. I can't say I'm a master upholsterer yet, but I will say they look far better than before, and even better than when we originally got the chairs.