Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Kitchen chair redo

The people who sold us this house graciously left us a few pieces of furniture.  The kitchen table and chairs are one of the things they left us.  While functional they needed updating.  The first thing I decided to do was to recover the cushions.  Next I will be replacing the rollers as these are old and squeak and don't roll well.
I took a few pictures of the chairs as I was recovering them.  I forgot to take a picture of the actual recovering process but I will try to explain what I did.

The first thing I did was measure the chair seat front to back and side to side, I also measured down and around to the bottom both ways.  I figured I needed about 30 inches by 30 inches of fabric for each chair.  This would give me plenty of fabric to fold around and down under and staple.  The home DEC fabric came in 60 inch width so I bought 60 inches.  When I got home I cut the piece of fabric into four pieces.
This is what the chairs looked like when I began.
Flip the chair over and remove all screws that are holding the seat onto the frame of the chair. Take the seat off the chair and lay on your fabric which you have spread out onto your kitchen table.  My chairs had a flat or even side which was the front so I folded the fabric under and stapled along the even edge trying to keep the fabric even.  Next I turned the whole thing around and stapled the other side which would be the back of the chair or where it meets the back of the seat.  I pleated, stapled and so on from the middle out.  Then I did the same thing to the sides.  Don't be afraid to use plenty of staples.  Mollie took the old seats off and put the new seats on while Hannah and I recovered them with the new fabric.
Screw the newly covered chair pad back onto the chair. 

Then you end up with new chair pads.  They make the whole chair look so much better and cost me less than $15.00.  I forgot to mention that the main reason I recovered the chairs was because the old compressed wood of one of the seats broke, so we took that chair pad completely apart and traced the seat onto new plywood, cut it out with a jig saw and used that new piece of wood to recover and make the new seat from.  I used the old padding that was already on the chairs.  The other three chairs I did not take apart and just put the new fabric over the existing fabric.  If they had been badly stained or torn up I would of taken the old fabric off and replaced the foam as well.  Since mine were not torn or stained just old I just covered over them.

2 comments:

Money Hunny said...

Great job! Very good explanation, too!

Unknown said...

Looks very nice now. Really good job.