How-To Recover Dining Room Chairs

Posted on February 23, 2009 by DishOnDesignGal

Old upholstery

If you’ve been following my Dining Room project, you’re probably wondering when in the heck I’m ever going to finish it. Haha – me too! Last week I took a step towards completion and decided to recover the dining room chair seats – I took some photos along the way. If you have chairs that are simply covered with fabric (no welding or box seams) like my before picture above, it’s really simple to do and very inexpensive. Here’s how…

1. Select and purchase fabric. The sales clerk at the fabric store can tell you how much fabric you need based on the width and pattern repeat of the fabric that you choose. Make sure to choose one that will hold up to the appropriate usage. If you use these chairs daily versus a few times a year, make sure to select one that will hold up! I actually chose reversible fabric and am going to upholster the chairs at each end of the table differently than the rest of the chairs just to mix things up a bit. Apparently Sami (dog above) and Beanie (cat below) want to be in on the action

carpet-drapes-and-seats

2. You’ll need these tools… a needle-nose pliers, sharp scissors, flat head screw driver and a staple gun.

tools-that-youll-need

3. Remove the seats from each chair frame. Turn the chair over and remove the 4 screws that are securing the cushion to the frame at each corner.

4. Loosen staples. On the underside of the seat, loosen each staple with a flat head screw driver

lift-staple-with-a-flathead-screw-driver

5. Remove the staples. With the needle-nosed pliers, remove each staple till there there are none left to secure the fabric to the seat. Note: make sure to keep all removed staples in a pile or container to dispose of – trust me on this… a few stray staples WILL find their way into your foot if you are not careful!

remove-staples1

6. Remove the old fabric. Turn the cushion over and carefully remove the fabric, being cautious to not disturb the padding.

Note: If the padding is good shape, simply re-use it. This is the easiest route. If it does need to be replaced (lumpy, disintegrating, stained, etc.), purchase new padding from your fabric store and cut to fit the shape of your chair.

padding

7. Cut fabric. On a table, spread out your fabric with the front of it face down to the table. Carefully, lay your padded seat cushion (padding to the backside of the fabric) on top , leaving a few inches on the side closest to the edge of the fabric. Make sure that any stripes are straight and patterns are going in the right direction. Cut fabric in the shape of the cushion, making sure to cut wide enough all the way around to allow you to wrap and fold the edge of the fabric when stapling.

cut-fabric

8. Staple the fabric. Start by applying one staple at the center of each side. Pull the fabric around firmly (but not too tight), fold fabric so that the the unfinished fabric edge is not exposed, and staple. By doing one staple in the center of each side, you will ensure that the pattern/stripe is where you want it to be and that you have enough fabric on each side. PS. Make sure that you don’t cover up the screw holes that you’ll need to access when re-attaching the seats.

staple-center-of-sides

9. Continuing Stapling. After you’ve put a staple in the center of each side, continue folding fabric and stapling fabric about every 2 inches until you get about 1/2″ from each corner.

fill-in-to-each-corner

10. Staple the Corners. Gather the remaining fabric at the corners, pulling firmly around the corner and secure with several staples. Cut any access corner fabric about an inch past the staples so that it doesn’t cause the seat to sit too high when re-attached. Picture below is not trimmed.

pull-back-corner

staple-corner

You’re almost done!

11. Re-attach the seats to the chair frame. Turn the chair frame on it’s side and re-attach the seat with the 4 screws.

finished-stapling

Here’s my finished chair! Now I just need a new chandelier and a couple of miscelaneous things and my Dining room will be done – woohoo!

finished-chair

How to Draw a Floor Plan (and why it’s so important!)

Posted on November 5, 2007 by DishOnDesignGal

To some people, the thought of drawing a floor plan may sound overwhelming, but in reality, it’s actually pretty simple with the step by step instructions below. Once you try it, you’ll wonder why you waited this long and you’ll find that your project ultimately will be much less stressful when you have a floor plan to reference.

There’s a good reason why professional designers and decorators start a project by drawing up a floor plan, and it’s because a floor plan truly is the foundation for a room that is functional as well as beautiful. Additionally, a floor plan will help you to determine not only what furniture will fit into the space, but what is the best furniture arrangement for that room. Whether you’re buying new furniture or using exisiting, it’s much easier (and fun!) to draw your floor plan and do multiple furniture arrangements on paper as opposed to breaking your back moving heavy items and then discovering out it doesn’t work.

Floor plans are important in the fact that they allow you (and prompt you) to really think out the space; planning for seating, lighting, electrical outlets, cable boxes, traffic flow, and more. The biggest problem that most people have is actually understanding a floor plan and feeling comfortable with it. The best way to understand how a floor plan applies to you is to imagine yourself in that room. Pretend to walk through the door. Look around and start visualizing each wall. Is there a great fire place that you want to hang a beautiful piece of artwork above? Consider making that the main conversation area around the fireplance. Perhaps on another wall there are two large windows with a gorgeous view – consider that area for a smaller conversation area or gametable for a secondary seating option that capitalizes on the view. Pretend that you are in one of the seating areas. Is there a lamp for reading? An outlet to plug in that lamp? A table to set down a drink? Is there enough room (3 feet) to walk between the furniture?

To sum it up, drawing a floor plan can be the difference between a so-so room and a room that everyone wants to spend time in. Imagine yourself living, playing, and relaxing in that room. Have fun, be creative, relax and get started. I think you’ll discover that with a floor plan in hand, decorating just got a little easier!

Click on the link below to our website and scroll down to the bottom right of the page, you’ll find printable step by step instructions to drawing your own floor plan. Additionally, you’ll even find a convenient download to print off free grid paper to help get you started. http://www.assistantproductgroup.com/APG-2/index-3.html Good luck!

Favicons made Simple (a technology tip for do-it-yourself website owners)

Posted on October 26, 2007 by DishOnDesignGal

How hard can it be to add an favicon to your website? Pretty darn hard, actually! What I thought would be a simple hour or so project turned out to be a day into the night painfully long process. I discovered that every instructional article that I found through google searches either spoke in a geek speak terminology I didn’t understand or they left out a key component or two (kind of like grandma’s secret recipes!) that left me really frustrated!

Because I love to network , I’m breaking it down to simple stupid, so that if you want to add a favicon to your site, you will be spared the grief and frustration I experienced when attempting to learn how to do it.

In a nutshell, here is everything you need to know about favicons from a totally self taught female entrepreneur You will need a little photoshop & microsoft publisher knowledge to create the actual image.

THE ANSWERS TO SOME BASIC QUESTIONS…

What is an Favicon? It’s that cute little picture that represents you or your company – for example, if you look at the address bar right now for wordpress you’ll see a black and white W inside of a circle. That’s the Avatar for WordPress. Mine looks like this…

you can see it at http://www.assistantproductgroup.com/ as well.

I can’t see a little picture – why not? Apparently, from what I’ve read, it’s because you might be using an older version of explorer. I have to say I initially fought the switch to explorer 7.0, but absolutely love the features now that I have it. Totally, recommend getting it.

Why do I need a favicon? Well, really you don’t, but everyone else has them, they’re cute, and “experts” say it makes your site look more professional. Consider it the little black dress for computers.

STEP by STEP Instructions for posting a Favicon to your Website

Select an image that you want to use for your favicon. Make it 1-2 colors and simple. It also needs to be square. Because it is so small – simple with a punch works best.

Here is how I created my favicon:

I inserted a text box into publisher, kept it square & made the back ground white.
I inserted another text box, typed an ”a” in bold, chose a clear background and made the font red. I then placed the “a” on top of the white text box and centered it.
Grouping the two boxes, I right clicked and saved them to my pictures as a jpeg.
I then opened photoshop, opened the jpeg and cropped the picture so that it was still square and had minimal white showing around the edges. I saved that to a jpeg.
I opened that jpeg and in photoshop resized the jpeg to 16 pixels by 16 pixels and saved that.

Technology Newsflash: You now must convert the jpeg to an ICO. Truly, I didn’t know ICO’s existed until this point. An ICO is simply a file format. There are pictures in jpegs, gif, tiff, eps, and who knew…ICO. By the way ICO is short for Icon.

Next you must convert your latest jpeg to an ICO. I used a program called Irfan View
I downloaded a free Irfan View plug in for my photoshop to do this, but there is a free download for infran at http://www.download.com/IrfanView/3000-2192-10021962.html?part=dl-IrfanView&subj=dl&tag=button which is probably easiest.
Once downloaded, convert your favicon to an ICO and name it favicon. When converted to an ICO file it will be called favicon.ico. It MUST be called exactly this to work.
Save (import) this file into your image file on the root directory of your website.
go to your home page in HTML (the view that shows all the text and codes for that page) and below <head> (towards the top of the page) cut and paste this text exactly:

Here is my HTML before I pasted in the link above:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”> <html><head> <meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

<title>Decorating Organizer for decorating, building or remodeling a home</title>

Here it is with the link pasted below <head>

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN”> <html><head> <LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” href=”images/favicon.ico” mce_href=”images/favicon.ico”> <meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″>

<title>Decorating Organizer for decorating, building or remodeling a home</title>

Make sure that it pastes exactly as you copy it – mine changed when I pasted it and I had to correct it.
Check your preview to make sure that it isn’t showing up anywhere on the website home page anywhere, which would mean that something is wrong. If it is showing up on the page, check to make sure placed it in under the first <head> and not elsewhere. Sometimes you have to experiment till it’s right. Always preview before you save!
Save page and open up internet explorer (hopefully, you have 7.0) and go the website. It may take a minute or so to show on the front page and several or more minutes f(or even several hours) or it to spread to the other pages. It should show up on the tab that it was opened in and also on the address bar. If you don’t have explorer 7.0, it will only show when you save it as a favorite. Note: I didn’t think it worked on the other pages and was just done with the whole deal and went to bed in the wee hours of the next mornng. When I woke up - voila! It was magic and had spread to all my other pages. How cool is that? I guess it takes time for explorer to generate it to the other pages.

Good Luck! Let me know if it helps or if you have any tips to share!