When Curt and I bought our dining room set we were still two years away from having Connor, so buying six dining room chairs with white microfiber covers did not set off any alarms bells. Today, with two kids, it sets off a lot of alarm bells. Like spaghetti sauce, pizza, grease, chocolate, etc. All food that is dropped by Connor onto the chair cushion. I have cleaned the cushions so many times that they all look dingy. I tried putting a towel in Connor's chair, but this is what I hear from him, "I don't want a towel in my chair. I don't need it. You don't have a towel in your chair. Dad doesn't have one." Eventually he ends up kicking it out sometime during dinner. At this point I am so tired of cleaning them, that if he drops spaghetti sauce on one, I wipe the blob off, but leave the stain. My new goal is to re-upholster all the chairs.
So yesterday I went to Hancock Fabric with my mom and the lady said I would need about two and a quarter yards of fabric for six chairs. I thought I had better get three in case I make a mistake. The fabric I really liked was 30 dollars a yard though. 90 dollars for three yards! Then she said it was forty percent off, so I bought it. I brought my fabric home and went about trying to remove a cushion from the frame of the chair. Actually I gave Connor the screwdriver and he did it. Super easy. Then I examined the bottom. The bottom has about two hundred staples holding the fabric on! Yikes, but I thought, "How hard can it be to remove a staple." Apparently, it is REALLY, REALLY hard. I tried using needle nose pliers to pull them out, but after thirty minutes I had removed twenty staples, my hand was cramped up and I was sweating. All of the staples are practically flush with the wood, meaning I can't even grip them with the pliers. Today, Vivian and I went to Ace Hardware and bought a tool made specifically to pull staples out. It is even worse than the needle nose pliers. So I looked online and found a tool that looks like it could really do some damage to the staples and possibly my finger, but it is twenty dollars plus shipping. I don't really want to spend that much on it, so I am contemplating just removing the fabric with a razor blade and leaving the staples in since they are flush with the wood and covering them with the new fabric. This is probably what I am going to end up doing. I'm taking pictures, but I haven't really accomplished anything yet, so I'll wait to post them.
