Estate Sale Chairs – Finished!

Finally! Ah….. The chairs are finished. For those of you reading along, first we found these great chairs at an estate sale for just $80. (Six chairs, a table, three leaves, and those protector things.) We have a casual dining room and felt like the table would go really well in our place. (Besides that? It was so cheap, how could we pass it up?) Our old table was small and we only had three chairs. Game over. We bought this one.

But we needed to spruce it up. The chairs were already half torn apart, which is why I’m sure they were still there. Now, recovering chair seats like this is usually no big deal. But of course (probably since I’m blogging about this and showing you all how easy it is), first I ran out of staples in the middle of things, and then we ran into a snag with the backs.

We needed to borrow tools to finish up. Thankfully, a friend let us use his brad nailer. It was just the thing we needed. We also had to use an air compressor, which was loud, scared the dog, but worked like charm.

Now, I should say that if you don’t have this tool (and don’t want to buy one), you can also rent it at your local hardware store. We would have done that if we didn’t have a friend we could borrow it from.

These chairs had a really wonky design. They used a board for the back (which, once I took off the backs, looked to me like it was done as an afterthought – who knows) and the reason we needed a brad nailer like this was because a regular old hammer would have split the crappy boards.

So we recovered the boards, finished them on the front and back, and then just nailed them into place from the front. You can’t even see the nail holes! (That brad nailer is like a dream. A dream I tells ya!) I had worried that I would need to figure out some solution to cover up the nail holes, but you can’t even see them.

Now the chair backs are secured on the front and back, and our table has been returned to a place to eat instead of a workbench.

I think the chairs go really nicely with our curtains and tablecloth. The tablecloth, incidentally, is one my aunt made me for my birthday the year before last.  It’s one of my faves, because she is such a special lady. (And she does really great work, doesn’t she?)

Okay, the table is done, who is coming over for dinner?