Tools of the Trade (Perhaps. I Don't Actually Know)

Disclaimer: I'm not a furniture or upholstery professional, and even if I were on TV, I probably wouldn't play one, but I'm a highly optimistic amateur.

I've made well-fitting slipcovers for two sofas (with separate cushions etc) and recovered the stools in my kitchen.

Just in the interest of full disclosure and all.

 Once upon a time there was a woman with a mahogany dining room table that used to be her grandmother's, two small children (two and four or thereabouts) and no dining room chairs. So she bought a set of chairs with blah beige seats which she didn't care about since the children, as children will, intentionally or not, were undoubtedly going to ruin them.

And they did.

 The children did, as is wont to happen when fifteen or more years pass, grow up, pretty much, and as a benefit of same, their table manners improved such that the possibility of more attractive and more comfortable seats on the ugly and uncomfortable dining room chairs became a very real possibility.

There was research into seat cushions, with the by-the-foot stuff at the fabric stores being rather disappointing, so I made a new friend at the only foam place in the area which turns out to be walking distance from my house. Turns out that people, other people, not me, have the oddest foam requests ever (I asked). Like the woman who wanted a (rather thick) mattress for her disabled son with a hole drilled in at at groin position, so that a bucket could be placed under the mattress so that she didn't have to get u during the night to take him to the bathroom. I kid you not (though my friend at the foam store may have been testing the limits of my gullibility but I don't really think so).

My new dining room chairs have two-inch seat cushions instead of a measly half inch.

Fabric stores were visited, swatches were brought home, the interwebs were scoured, but nothing was really supercalifragilisticexpialodocious, so she made do with second best at fifty percent off at Joann's which is actually ok.

I am here to tell you that this was a manlier task than I had anticipated.

I have blisters on my knuckles where they scraped the wooden seat as I pried the staples holding the old fabric free.

I have a blister on the side of the pad of my middle finger from screwing the seat bottoms back onto the chairs.

If I sit for more than five minutes it feels as though I might not make it up again.

If I turn my head I hear crunchy things in my neck.

But I do, even if I say so myself, have a fabulous set of dining room chairs which (in money though I guess not effort but really, when you consider the level of smugness and self-satsifaction involved has to be worth quite a bit) cost about what one new chair would have set me back.

I may be unable to get out of bed tomorrow, but surely it'll have been worth it.