Projects on the horizon

I made the mistake of telling my mom about this blog I've been doing. Her eyes lit up and she began to make a list of projects that she wants me to do around the house for her. GREAT!!
Here is the list she gave me so far. {There is sure to be more added to this!}

• Redecorate our dining room
     ~ including painting, recovering dining room chairs, painting chair wood and dining room table.
• Repaint the bench on our porch
• Recover kitchen chairs
• Decorate the upstairs bathroom
• Repaint the kitchen

Here are some ideas that I have for some of these projects:


My mom and I went to a fabric store and looked at fabric for the chair projects. This striped fabric is what my mom picked out for the dining room chairs. The walls in the dining room have a white chair rail with a burgundy color on the bottom half of the wall and tan carpet. We plan to paint the chairs and table a chocolate brown color, so this fabric will match great. The color isn't exact in the picture, but it has some black, some brown, tan and a golden brown color.

She would like the chairs in the kitchen to coordinate with those in the dining room, but not match exactly. We found a few different fabrics we liked, but after my sister vetoed one of them my mom decided she liked the other one.  This is the one we all liked. It has a black/brown background and white, golden brown, and tan.

I'm open to suggestions for the bench color. It sits in front of the red brick portion of our house. Currently it has dark brown wood and a hunter green steel frame. I was thinking of painting the frame black and the wood an orange-yellow. I thought of orange first, but my parents ride Harley Davidson motorcycles, so we don't want more orange and black decoration! We were also throwing around the idea of painting the slats of wood different colors {obviously yellow and black aren't an option!} but I'm not sure what colors would work best.