{When the Paint Dries......}: Dining Room Set Re-do Part 2

In Dining Room Set Re-do Part One I showed you the beautiful dining room that I had found on Craigslist and has been in our dining room for a little over a year, functional but really needed redone.

I got the kick in the butt motivation I needed when I learned that my husbands sister and brother in law were coming to visit for a week from England. Even though we didn't sit down to eat at it (they don't have a Cheesecake Factory over there) I'm feeling pretty good about finally getting it finished. :)

The chairs had already been previously sanded down (yay!)
So after wiping them down I was able to start staining them.

I was unsure of what type of wood/color would work best so I choose the Red Oak and it seemed to match the table quite well.

Luckily it was one of the few nice days we had in April and I was able to stain them in the driveway.

This is probably the biggest stain job I have ever taken on, I use a foam craft paintbrush that would extremely well, it really held a lot of stain and spread it very well. The one suggestion I have is to make sure that after it dries that you wipe it down really well, a couple of days after I was still finding sticky spots.

Two of the chair cushions looked like this^

I took the first piece off to use a template and this was underneath, with these two I just covered right over them, figured there was no need to change the padding and it was a lot cheaper.

I laid out the first piece of fabric and cut around it, just a rough estimate, I don't like to measure anything if I don't have too :)

The second two chairs had these cushions on them, I was tempted to leave them unattached and just cover them, but I want the table to look somewhat uniform. When I took this covers off, underneath was two feather cushions, I ended up covering over them.