Simple Chair Makeover - Deciding When to Recover & When Not To

A few months ago, I did a consult in trade for two upholstered chairs that my friend was going to replace.  

Originally, I thought I would recover the chairs.  However, once I got them home and mulled over it, I decided that recovering them just didn't seem like the best route to go.

Back in 2012 I recovered this chair for another one my friends -

before:

after:

If you click here you can see the tutorial and process it took to recover it. 

As you can see in the before picture, the chair fabric was outdated and definitely not neutral for the lighter tones she was decorating with.  

Here is the picture of one of the two matching chairs I was working with -

Unlike my friends chair, this one was already covered in a neutral fabric.  The chair itself was in really good condition, the fabric was clean, and had no rips or tears.  I just couldn't come up with any good reasons why I should spend hours and hours and hours, and a gazillion staples later...just to get the same chair with a slightly different neutral fabric. 

However, the style wasn't quite modern enough for me and I spent some time thinking how I could change things up.

I love nail-head trim so I thought that would be a good start.  The other thing that bothered me was the "T" cushion you sit against.  It just wasn't working for me, but my husband said the chair wasn't comfortable without it. :/  (I know, I know, I already told him decorating goes with the saying, "beauty is pain"...didn't fly). So, I took that "T" cushion and sewed it into a plain square. 

Here is what I ended up with! -

I used 5 packs of nail-head trim, bringing my total to $10.

Not a bad price for a 'new to me' piece of furniture. :)