Outdoor Furniture Covers

As you may have already read in this blog, I have become interested in outdoor furniture covers for my patio furniture. I have spent a fair amount of time searching online and in stores such as Home Depot, Homesense and Home Outfitters and have had marginal luck at best. There seems to be a very limited target market of consumers ofr such things and as a result good quality outdoor furniture covers are hard to find. At least they are hard to find in my community. The very few I have found don't suit my needs as they are either the wrong size, wildly expensive, unattractive, or are cheaply constructed.

I have put a great deal of thought into what qualities I am looking for and I have a mental image of what I would consider to be the perfect outdoor furniture covers for me. Firstly, the colour would be fairly neutral perhaps a sage green or taupe. I don't want a dark colour as I fear the sun and snow would fade it and it would look worn too quickly. That said, I don't want too light of a colour either as I don't want it to show stains.

I want the covers to be made out of a very thin material that can be stored in a very small un-obtrusive spot. Ideally, all of the covers (4 chairs and a table) could be stuffed into a small bag roughly the size of a small sleeping bag bag or a yoga mat bag. I am thinking of some sort of durable spandex material.

I would want my outdoor furniture covers to be extremely easy to put on and take off. At the end of a late night, I don't want to feel overwhelmed by the task of putting on my patio furniture covers. To me this means things such as stretchy light weight material with elasticized fasteners or perhaps velcro tabs. I would consider zippers but only zippers that are of the highest quality and easy to pull. Given that the zippers would be exposed to the elements I would only consider an excellent quality plastic zipper.

Lastly, I would want my covers to be UV and water resistant but not wind proof. The last thing I would want is for my patio furniture to be blown around like little sail boats or kites.

Actually, I suppose the last consideration would be price. Having something custom made in North America can be cost prohibitive so I will be looking for store bought outdoor furniture covers. In a perfect world I would like to be able to get a decent set for under $100.00. This means that I might need to wait for the end of summer sales.