4 New Chairs, 49 dollars!!

So the hubs and I (still so weird and so awesome to call him that!) are settling into our new abode. While we have already painted the kitchen and living room (I'm telling you, if you took the color of peanut butter, threw it up, and then smeared it on the walls, that was the color the previous owners seemed to think was appropriate for nearly every room in the house. Don't even get me started on the fuchsia NEON pink room). While painting is the quintessential way to spruce up a space, it was getting boring. Unchallenging. OK, my A.D.D. set in, whatever. I'd been planning planning planning this wedding. At the time, all I could think about was how awesome it would be when we were home from our honeymoon and I could come home after work and WATCH TV. DO NOTHING. This lasted for about a day 5 minutes before I was scouring the internet for a project. I took a page out of the BFF's book and decided to get on this home improvement without painting thing (Wanna know how long the no painting lasted? Stay tuned for tomorrow). Where do I start? Well, I cant scour theknot.com anymore, so I move to thenest.com and find this page. Lo and Behold, there are 4 upholstered chairs in Mom's storage that she's tried several times to give me. Why haven't I taken them? Well, I was the one that moved them from her attic to said storage unit, and I know that they are faded, filthy, and well..... filthy. They are, however, very good chairs, and I swore to her I would take them when I found money to have them reupholstered. Little did I know, this is quite an easy DIY project. In theory. So I go get the chairs. It takes me a good 30 minutes to figure out how to get all 4 of these things in my Acura. I find that I often go somewhere to pick up large, bulky items without thinking about their ability to fit in this tiny white car. This has to come from driving a truck for 10 years. After moving the chairs around in several different configurations (way more brain-working than sudoku, mind you), I closed the doors and got the chairs home:

 I bought fabric at Hob Lob, and found a (working) staple gun at the barn. This might have been the most impressive task of the day.

At some point, I had also come across a web page talking about reupholstering and in their case, they just put the new fabric over the old. This sounds easy, so I decide to copy. I use a plethora of fabric cleaner to clean the  newly acquired chairs, only to remove the seats to find that they are still downright disgusting:

No big deal, I think to myself... It's still a free chair. I'll just remove the fabric and use the same foam. No biggie. No biggie? there are 155 staples in every single one of these chairs. I know, because I counted. That's 620 staples. And these are old chairs. The wood has shrunk. They are not easy to get out. FML. But I do it. and then I find that not only is the fabric disgusting, but the padding is too!

Gross. Back to Hobby Lobby for foam:

Now that I have new (clean) foam and new (clean) fabric, I think I'm set. Wrong. Remember those pesky staples and how hard they were to get out? Well, they are also that hard to get in. They just won't go all the way in (that's what she said):

I resort to hammering them in the rest of the way, which doesn't make them go in any farther, but rather makes the bend and buckle. Whatever. I want to be done. At some point, this stops happening. I am still not sure if my skills go better or the wood got softer (not what she said), but I'm gonna decide to believe the first. Finally:

And a before and after:

I am pretty proud of myself, yes. And I think the orange will go great with the deep, dark blue we are painting the dining room agains pretty much everyone's advice. It's not like I can't paint it again, guys!!!