Thrift Store Decorating with Goodwill &  Vintage Finds | How to Recover Chair Seats Tutorial DIY

So styling things and getting stuff ready for my new website has really inspired me to actually make over one of the rooms in my house. When I first moved in my dining room was really really wild. It had 1990s wallpaper and ninja green walls. Sorry for the squeaker shoes. The dining room's right here and it has these really cool sliding pocket doors with the original hardware on it and we have a corner fireplace which is really pretty wrapped windows. One of the reasons that I really loved our home when we first walked in was the big chunky moldings that are everywhere and the dropped windows and that beautiful natural light. I felt like the natural like good bones of the house were kind of getting lost in and all the wild colors and the patterned wallpaper. So I wanted to neutralize it and create like a really blank slate to highlight the good bones that our house already has. Painters have been working on things this week so I thought I'd show you the dining room because it looks so much bigger and brighter in here now. So nice. All the trim work like the windows really shine now and like the fireplace the wood on there looks so pretty with all that wallpaper gone. Yay no more wallpaper and green ninja turtle green paint. But doing this kind of made my dining room a little bit boring honestly because everything is brown and white in here so I want to add some pops of color. I got these chairs at a thrift store and they have been great. They're just a reproduction antique but they have that look. Scoping the goodwill for fabric is hands down my like go-to when I have a project that I want to keep thrifty and one of the great things you can do is repurpose an old curtain because they're typically made with a really really heavy thick fabric that can also be used for upholstery or creating pillows and it's super thrifty. But since I knew exactly what I wanted it made thrifting it a little bit difficult so I ended up going to the fabric store for this fabric. I'm going to show you how I recovered my chairs. It's not the most professional way of doing things but it is really quick and easy and it's what I've been doing for years. All four seats are off and now the fun part can finally begin. I'm going to spread out the fabric and cut all the squares that I need and then we're going to head outside and do some stapling. So my goal is to be able to have one of these fleurs on each of the seat. In reality I actually do have way more fabric than I need but this allowed me to get all the points that I wanted on each one of the seats. So as just a dry run I put the pattern that I want right under the seat. The original upholstery is in really good condition so there's no need to remove it. If you have any kind of tears or lumps and bumps within the actual like foam padding of your seat then you'll definitely want to take it down and start from scratch but these are in good shape. I just don't like the the color and the print anymore so we can go right over the top of it. So let's see here let's get her lined up. I want that point of the flower at the top. Okay I've got everything all stapled around the entire perimeter of the chair so the next step is to do the corners and I thought I would show you a little trick that I do to kind of give that smooth look. So you just want to take your fingers and kind of push the fabric in from side to side to create that corner and then smooth it with your thumb as you pull. As far as like all this excess goes you can literally just cut it off with your scissors get rid of all this extra stuff that we don't need that's flopping around. So I'm gonna go in staple all of the rest and then clean up all of the excess fabric. Okay now that we've got the chairs recovered it's time to accessorize. This is the fun part right? So I'm gonna go around my house and find things that I already own. First I'm gonna look for all the blue things and then I'm gonna try and find some like white accents especially like vases and stuff. Yeah I think that'll be good. The naked lady and cherub faces were something that have been in our family for years. My mom gave them to me and I'm originally from California so one of them fell off a shelf and just like shattered during an earthquake and my mom carefully glued it back together. It doesn't hold water anymore but it's pretty to look at. We have a really big laurel hedge down our driveway and I always go out there and I pick little clippings to poke in some of my floral arrangements because it's free and especially right now I don't have a lot of things that are blooming in my yard so it's a great way to incorporate like a natural bouquet if you will in your house without spending any money. The table came together really nicely. I love like a clean table. I don't really like a unless it's food. So I took a lace tablecloth and I folded it like four times and created a really nice long length runner down the center and on top I placed three really beautiful vases. The first one my mom gave to me for Christmas and she got it at an estate sale. It has a really beautiful botanical like Asian like flair to it. It's gorgeous and then I have this little squatty honeycomb looking vase that I got at Dale's Auction House. This one's really old. You can tell by like the weight of it and it's a little bit uneven so you can tell it was handmade and I love that it's not perfect. The center one is so freaking cute. I got it at a garage sale and it's like this chalkware urn thing and it has two little chubby cherub babies on it and I love their little fat legs. They're so like squishy and cute looking. I remember when I got that thing on the car ride home I was like cradling my cherub baby urn because I did not want it to break my sweet little babies. He was a garage sale fine for $10 and he's been all over the house too. That's what's kind of fun about quarantine time. It's like pushing us to reinvent the wheel here right? We've all gone out thrifting and gone to yard sales and goodwill over the years and collected some cool things so let's use what we've got. Let's pull stuff out of cupboards and borrow and steal from other rooms to kind of like refresh our space right? It's fun to do and it's free. Thank you so much for watching today. I hope you had fun with this video and I hope like maybe I inspired you to recover your dining room seats because it's so easy to do. Don't forget to subscribe and check out my new website and I'll see you in the next video.