How to Reupholster a Dining Chair
If your dining room chairs are worn and have seen better days, you may be considering replacing them. If this is in your budget and you can find chairs in a style that you like and fits your decor, that is wonderful. One option that gets overlooked is to reupholster the chairs you currently have. This is a project that you can do yourself, is very affordable, and can completely change the look of a dining room.
When you decide to replace the upholstery on your chairs the first thing you will want to do is find a new fabric to use. Large craft stores and fabric shops should have many varieties to choose from. Just make sure that you get something that is graded for upholstery or it won’t last very long on a chair. Take your time in choosing a fabric. This will be the soul of your new dining room chairs. Unless you are going to change the entire room you might want to keep in mind what your design and decor is like and choose a fabric that will work well with what is already in the room.
While you are getting the fabric you can grab any other supplies that you will need that you don’t already have. Besides the fabric, you will need a pencil, a screw driver, a fabric measuring tape, scissors, a staple gun, and staples.
To begin your project start by removing the seat from the chair. Many chairs, simply, use screws to hold the seat in place. Remove these screws and put them somewhere so you can reattach the seat when you are finished.
Next, take your fabric and lay it face down on your working surface. Take your seat and place it upside down on the fabric. You should be looking at the bottom of the seat. You can now use the fabric measuring tape to measure the size of your seat. Sometimes you can just get a good guess of the size you need by folding the fabric over the edges of the seat. Take your pencil and make some marks where you will cut the fabric. Make sure you have enough fabric to fold over the sides of the seat and around to the bottom.
You need the fabric to reach the bottom because after you cut it you will stretch it and staple it to the bottom of the chair. You can use the old fabric as a guide to know where to staple. As you stable around the perimeter of the seat, make sure you stretch the fabric over the edge so you aren’t left with a lot of loose material on the sitting surface when you are finished. The corners will be the most difficult and most important to make a quality seat cover. Take your time and staple smaller sections at a time and everything will turn out great.
When you get the fabric all stapled down you can reattach the seat to the chair using the screws that you took out when you started.
