New Dining Room Table and Chairs

Karrie and i had been looking for a new table and chairs for the dining room.  After looking online and in a few stores, we decided that Craigslist might be a better option.  We saw people selling really nice tables for less than half the price they payed originally.  We both felt that we'd rather have a really nice, well made table that's slightly used, rather than a brand new, cheaply made table for the same price.

Also something i did not realize is that a lot of the cost is in the chairs themselves.  I thought that the table was the expensive part but typically the chairs accounted for more than half the price.  Also when we looked at the dining room sets they were selling in furniture stores, the table might be alright but the chairs would seem cheap and wobbly. 

So after a week or so of looking on Craigslist, Karrie saw a really nice set that met all of the things we were looking for.  We wanted it to be a dark brown color, approximately 40" wide and around 70" long.  Anything smaller than that and it wouldn't look right in the 11' x 14' dining room.  Plus we wanted there to be enough room for 6 people to sit.  And lastly the chairs had to be comfortable and sturdy.

Here's what we got.

This picture is after we picked the table up, brought it home, assembled the legs and set it up in the dining room.  Also the white fabric on the seats was not how it originally came. 

We didn't like the fabric on the chairs, it was an ugly dark striped pattern, so we decided to recover them.  We went to a fabric store and got some nice suede which was half off.  I think we ended up paying just $7 per yard.  It did take us about 30 tries to figure out how many yards of fabric we needed for 8 chairs.  We finally figured out that we needed 3 yards.  So it only cost around $22.

The hardest part was removing all of the staples.  There were at least 50 staples in each chair for just the black mesh fabric.  Then there were close to 100 staples that were actually holding down the chair fabric itself.  Removing the staples was my job, i used a screwdriver and pliers.  That's really all i helped with, Karrie did all the rest of the work.  

Once we removed the old chair fabric she used it as a pattern for the new material.  She cut out the new fabric then stapled it to the seat, starting in the middle so that there weren't any creases.  Then repeat 7 more times.

 Then we just had to re-screw them back on the chairs.  They look a lot better then the dark stripe pattern they were before.