Taster Spoon: Start at Home

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I've been on a home beautification kick recently. Our rental - though it has great square footage, the amenities of a condo complex and some great features (upstairs washer/dryer, fireplace, gas stove) - has some appearance issues.

It is, to use the correct "design industry" term, fugly.

A big, cracked, putty-colored garage door is the first thing to greet visitors; the entrance way is concrete slabs, dirty stucco walls and a mishmash of stringy attempts to grow vegetables, since it's the sunniest outdoor spot we have.

When you open the door, you see a small foyer area paved with mustard-colored tiles with dark brown grouting. The downstairs shoebox bathroom shares the same tile, as does the fireplace. The vinyl-floored kitchen is tiled in grimy "stone" colored tile and the same brown grouting that is powdery white with leftover Comet. The teensy back "yard" is a horrible sloping patchwork of cracked concrete, crumbling bricks, bark chips and empty, shady spots where nothing wants to grow.

We had dinner at the neighbors, whose house (which they own) is the mirror image of ours, and we were amazed at what a difference a little updating can do. Theirs is a chic modern home. Ours is a...well, we do the best we can.

Part of our problem is our furniture. Combining two single people's places into a unified home can be a fraught process where the individuals have distinct style preferences. (Find Your Style is my current favorite show... Her quiz says I am "ethnic eclectic" - what are you?) Me: teak/mahogany, Southeast Asian feel (hopefully) without being 'themey', rich colors, drama; Him: oak, Mission style, East Asian accents, neutrals, minimalism. Without knowing what the future holds, each is reluctant to surrender their favorite decor. Furthermore, we're renting, so that even if we did know what the future held, it seems like a bad idea to purchase anything particularly for this place.

Another, perhaps more fundamental, problem is the rental aspect. If I owned this place, I would fix the garage door and the entrance way and the back yard. I'm actually not necessarily agitating to "update" the entryway or the kitchen or the fireplace - I think this trend of bringing places up to the minute every decade has overtones of needless consumerism - but there are still avenues of celebrating what already exists that are closed to us.

The mustard tile is nothing short of hideous...yet it's hideous and 'dated' looking primarily because it looks slapped onto an otherwise white Renter's Delight. The management company made us swear we would not touch the newly-installed, brushed-nickel light fixtures. Those are attractive on their own, but look way worse in the environment than did the more old-fashioned brass that was there before. If we could paint the walls brown or gold, we could make the tile look intentional...but we can't. It's hard to know how long we're staying, so the investment of painting the place twice (color, then back to white) in what could be a short period never seems worth it.

Here's the other thing getting under my skin: our rent spikes this month by $150. Thanks, real estate bubble! I don't know whether this is the idea of our landlady or her management agency, but I wonder if they're under the misimpression that our place is as well-maintained and updated as our neighbors' place. I'm going to send a note itemizing the problems (worn carpet, peeling bathtub sealant, etc.), but wonder a little what it's legitimate to negotiate at this point where

1. we're already in the house

2. we always pay rent on time

3. we keep things up as well as they will allow (I've planted loads of landscapery, for instance)

4. the announced new rent may be a little high given the evident age of the unit.

Has any of you negotiated along these lines? Do we have any leverage? If I offered to paint the living room, for instance, a color other than white, if I'm confident it will improve the look of the place, could I ask for that to be taken out of our rent? What about the plants or the patio? I'd love to make the backyard beautiful, if we could get a rent credit. All of these things are, otherwise, money down the drain as far as I'm concerned.

In the mean time, I'm limited to moving furniture around and swapping out carpets. This past weekend I covered our maroon-upholstered dining room chairs (hand-me-downs) in a color more sympathetic to the...mustard.

Before:

After:

It's crazy easy. Here's how.

Requirements:

Wood chairs with fabric (or no) upholstery.
Staple gun! Get one that says high-powered or similar. The easier to shoot the better. Even my heavy-duty, "30% easier to squeeze!" one hurt my little hand.
Staples - get a size that says it's for upholstery. If they're too long they look bad, fall out, and only hold your fabric on by the points rather than by the cross bar, so it can overstress and damage your fabric. 5/16" worked for me; 1/2" were too long.
Fabric you'd love to see on your chairs! Do look in the "home decor" section for some gorgeous thick fabrics; on sale they can be quite respectable. My fabric was from the special occasion dress department. It was on sale.
Optional: foam padding - 1/2 inch thick is adequate, but I wanted more cush for my tush, so I got 1 inch. It was the most expensive part of this operation - $6/yard for 1/2", $12/yard for 1". If you want dramatic tufting, go even thicker. Because this is so expensive, you can definitely skip adding padding, particularly if there's already some there, or if you have a nice, thick fabric. I got it both because I wanted a little softness in the derrierre region, and because I thought our satin fabric would lie smoother with some give underneath.
Optional: "make to match" buttons, if you want the tufted look. They s/b in the home decor section. See "The button question," below.

Step 1. Measure your seats, adding several inches of overage, and noting whether the fabric weave or pattern you've picked requires a certain orientation (may increase your measurements).

Step 2. Buy the right amount of fabric and any foam and button frames. Our fabric was on sale for $4 a yard at JoAnn's! The foam was more like $11 a yard. :o( The button frames worked out to more than $1 apiece.

Step 3. Take apart your chairs. Hopefully your chairs will be designed for this. (But you could probably do your stapling in situ if necessary.) I discovered that my six chairs were assembled in four different ways. I suspect my hand-me-down set is itself a motley collection off of Craigslist. But they were all capable of having their seats unscrewed. (I discovered also that I am not the first to reupholster them. There was at least one layer below the maroon one: a bright orange-and-yellow weave!)

(Note those other holes for later!)

Step 4. Trace an outline 3-4 inches larger than your seats on your fabric and cut them out (larger if you use particularly thick foam). Optional: trace and cut your foam - give it an extra centimeter to bend over and soften the chair edges.

Step 5. The fun part! Lay your fabric face down,

the foam (if any) on top,

and the inverted chair seat on top. Make sure you've got the right orientation!

Stretch the fabric tight over the foam and staple away.

Use plenty of staples - they're cheap.

(A totally amateur job, but who will see? Besides the world via the internet, I mean.)

Step 6. Reassemble your chairs. Admire!

The entire set cost me $20 in fabric, maybe $45 in foam, $20 for the staple gun (reusable) and staples. The button covers were a lot, $3.50 for each set of three...but I may return them (see "The button question," below). I think the $70 was worth it, both to the extent it looks nice, and as an educational exercise. I've also gained a chair, and now have an attractive, uniform dining set for six. (One of the chairs had its cover completely torn off - it's been living in the garage since I got it - and I was going to give it to Goodwill and seat my sixth guest on a folding chair, until I learned how to do this from HGTV...Design on a Dime made a tufted headboard this way, out of pegboard, foam, fabric and buttons.)

The button question. You can create a tufted look with matching fabric covered buttons. Check out the bottom of your chairs before your start recovering. They may have big holes drilled through the wood for this very purpose. If there are not already holes there, you will have to drill your own, so consider this in advance of your covering job. One, three or four button patterns would all be classic. Assemble your buttons with fabric scraps and the "make to match" frames. They're like using a needlepoint hoop. After the seats are covered, with very strong thread and a thick needle (depends on your fabric and the squishiness of your foam), poke through the back of the chair all the way through to the top and through the button and pull it down tight and secure.

I love this tufted look, and it was my original plan to do this. I was going to do one central button per chair. But I turned the seats over and discovered that, just as the seats assembled via various combinations of screws, the pre-drilled holes were a mish-mash of two, three and four buttonholes. Also, the buttons themselves work out to about $1.15 a pop, which comes to as much as $4.50 per chair, if I use the suggested patterns. What do you think, for an extra $27 for the set, should I bother?

Gorge.

Comments

Well, personally, having different button patterns on my matching chairs would drive me absolutely batty, so I'd probably leave them as is. No to mention, they look absolutely beautiful just the way they are, and I wonder if the buttons would make the chairs less comfortable for your tush? You wouldn't want that to happen after putting in the extra money for the super cush foam!

I have a vanity seat that I've been thinking about recovering, and you've inspired me to add it to our house projects list!

Posted by: Wickedly Scarlett | June 12, 2008 at 02:11 PM