The Bench

My mother and her best friend purchased twin benches when I was probably around 8 years old. A while ago. My mom loved it and she covered that bench, recovered it, and it followed us around the country to all our different homes. When my sister bought her own house four years ago she got the bench and covered it. Then, it ended up in my garage about a year ago. Until Today. I got it in my head that since it was just sitting in MY garage I might as well do something with it. I wanted to use it in my kitchen along one side of our table so that I can fit more folks around and free up more chairs. I had a JoAnn's coupon (and Black Friday weekend sales), so I dashed on over this morning and picked out some pretty cute fabric. Then came the work. Work I hadn't really planned on. Not fun work.

Here is the bench as it looked this morning. Not very cute.



First, I ripped off that awful fabric. And found this:



Yikes! Flash back to the early 80s! So, I pulled it off. (And by "pulled it off" I mean painstakingly used a tack puller to remove 2 frillion staples from the underside for EACH layer of fabric!) Only to reveal this:



Huh? Okay... Well, I actually love that bright orange vinyl, so I saved it for some future as-of-yet-unknown project. I threw out the old (but not THAT old, right?) foam and tossed about 10 pounds of tacks. Seriously, that stuff was on there GOOD.



I cleaned the bench, added new foam, and used my own limitless supply of staples to add first the fabric and then a layer of clear vinyl to make clean-up easy. (Apologies in advance to anyone who wants to recover it sometime in the future.)

I think it's pretty cute.