Dining Room Table and Chairs Completed ~ Finally!

It's finally finished!!!!!!!

It seems like it has taken forever to get this dining room table completed!  We originally bought it in March, and it has been a long time coming to get it to this point!  This table was inspired by one that I saw at Ikea for $300 and $80 for each chair.  Well, I can promise you that I did not spend that!  Here's how I did it.......

As usual, I prayed to find an affordable dining set like the one I saw at Ikea.  I also needed a way to get it into my house, since we do not have a truck or a van.  So when I saw this large table with two leafs......

.....and these chairs on Craigslist for $75, I inquired about them.  After we inquired, we discovered that the people selling the table and chairs lived three houses down!  Pretty crazy, huh?  It's like it was just meant to be!  God is so faithful to us!  If they didn't live so close, we wouldn't have scored this dining set for such a great price!

Now there were two problems with this dining set....
 
Number 1 -
One of the eight chairs was broken and could not be fixed.  That meant that I needed to find three more matching chairs or a different set of four chairs to mix and match with  the others.

Number 2 -
The table and chairs looked like Easter eggs vomited all over my dining room and they had to be changed ~ immediately! I couldn't stand looking at them!

 Problem two was an easy fix with Annie Sloan's CHALK PAINT!  Chalk paint saved me from sanding and priming this dining set.  It took two coats of paint to cover everything, but it dried really fast.  I first read about chalk paint in the blogosphere, and I knew it was going to make my life easier.  It's not cheap, but it's worth it.  I ordered two cans of graphite paint and one can of the soft wax for this project.  You can read more about chalk paint here.

The table was really easy to paint.  It only took me an hour to apply both coats.



After the paint dried, I took a rag and applied the wax.  This wax was really easy to work with, and it dried really fast.  It also didn't have a strong scent that other waxes tend to have.



By April, the table was finished and decorated.  You can read more about that here, here and here.

Two months later, I completed the set of eight chairs after finding these three hideous things at a rummage sale.  They are the exact chairs to the set, and you guessed it, I only needed three chairs to complete my set!  You can read more about that and other garage  sale finds here.

To transform the chairs I had to first unscrew all eight seats from the chairs.

Then I began painting the chair.  The chalk paint appears greyish-blue when it is wet, but it dries much darker.  

 Painting these bad boys took forever, because the chairs had several detailed grooves that were difficult to coat.  It took me about an hour to paint each chair. 

Once the paint was dry, I took a rag and applied the Annie Sloan's soft wax.

While the chairs were drying, I worked on the seat cushions.

I took off the old fabric and staples and was left with the foam and board.

I tore two yards of my new fabric into eight pieces....

.....and began stapling my fabric to the seat cushions.....

......until it looked like this.

Once everything was dry, I screwed the cushions back to the chairs and marveled over the transformation!  I just love how they turned out!  It's a big difference from the Easter egg chairs I saw on Craigslist and the hideous things I found at the rummage sale.  But the truth is, I was overjoyed to find those things, because in my mind this is how I envisioned them!  I always saw their potential, so it was easy to look past the ugliness that they once were:)

Last but not least, let's break down the cost of this completed project:

Craigslist table and chairs:  $75
Rummage sale chairs: $20 
Annie Sloan's chalk paint and wax: $100
Two yards of home decor fabric from JoAnn's half off: $30
Ikea dishes: $40
Ikea placemats: $25
One yard of fabric for napkins: $12
Center pieces and runner -$10

I will be linking up to:

 http://www.sasinteriors.net/2011/06/saturday-spotlight-17/

http://betweennapsontheporch.blogspot.com/

and all of the parties on my party page