Updating The Dining Room

We did a little updating to our dining room a couple of years ago, adding a rug and changing the drapery fabrics. The furniture in there consists of a dining room table, four chairs, and a china cabinet. The set was my grandparent’s set. While it is darker than I would choose myself, I cherish it because it was my grandparents and it has sentimental value and memories associated with it. The one thing about the set that I have always disliked is that the set originally had rose pink upholstery on the chairs. Once we updated the room, we decided that we wanted to update the chairs as well, by getting rid of the pink.
We checked into upholsterers in the area, and found out that that’s pretty expensive. A friend suggested to me that we do it ourselves. I am far from crafty and had no idea how to go about this. Fortunately for me, she did. The first thing we did was purchase some upholstery fabric that we liked. We went with a medium sort of blue. Then we purchased batting, that soft, cushiony, fuzzy white material that’s inside some things. Then we got to work.
Taking off the old material wasn’t hard. The material was stapled to the chair seat, so all we needed to do was pull the staples out. Then we removed the old material. We were shocked to find that there was no padding to speak of under the old upholstery! No wonder it always seemed so flat and hard. We cut the batting to size and laid it down on top of the chair seat. Then we covered the seat (and batting) with the new material. Once everything was in place we stapled it down to the chair seat and replaced the seat back onto the chair frame. That was it. The nice thing about the blue we chose is that it matches blues and earth tones pretty well.
Have you ever done any redecorating yourself? What was it, and how did it turn out?