Reupholstering Can Be Fun

When my sister got married and my Me-Maw was downsizing to an apartment, my sister got her nice dining room table. My parents were nice enough to buy me a dining room table of my own that they were going to refinish and give to me... 5 years later and once we move to Maryland, I'll finally have a place to put it! My parents did a great job with the refinishing of the table. They also bought some chairs to match the table and they refinished those also. Again, they did a great job with those but left one thing up to me... reupholstering the chairs. 

Supplies for the project:

-2 inch foam from Hobby Lobby. This is similar to the one we bought, although we bought ours by the yard.

-An electric kitchen knife. This is VERY important. This stuff is a devil to cut through and the knife makes it easier. Extra points if you have to borrow one from the guidance councilor at your school. 

- The wooden bottoms of your chairs to trace

- Fabric

- A heavy duty staple gun. Extra points if you have to borrow it from your Bible study leader.

This was the previous cushioning and fabric that were on the chairs. It was possibly 40 years old and pretty gross. I applaud my parents for being able to see past the rough wood and nasty fabric. Although I was apprehensive about being in charge of the reupholstering, I was excited to get rid of this stuff. 

Now... Picking out the fabric may have been the part that scared me the most. B and I have very different opinions when it comes to colors/decorating and our first trip to look at fabric at Hobby Lobby did not go very well. We ended up going to All About Fabrics in Williamston, SC. They are only open 3 days a month (and looks kind of sketch) but they have a warehouse FULL of fabric and it is super cheap. We bought our fabric in the section that sells by the pound. Weird, right? That is how they sell their 1-5 yard scraps. We bought 2.74 pounds of fabric (about 6 yards) for a total of $13.70.

I watched 2 youtube.com videos before I started and I was surprised to see how simple these people made it seem. I'm not going to go in detail for every step of the process, these videos do a good job of it. Here are the videos in case you are wanting instructions also. Video 1 and Video 2.

Step 1. Trace your pattern.

Step 2. Cut your seats out. Because we bought ours by the yard, it was all curvy. Once I glued them to the wooden seats (Step 3), I put a bunch of our old text books on them while they dried. It worked pretty well. 

Step 4. Put your seats on your fabric, fold over and staple!

Step 5. Screw the bottoms back on to the chairs.

And now you have beautiful new chairs! It ended up being just as easy as the videos made it seem. I would recommend that anyone who wants new (looking) seats to try to do it yourself. I felt pretty good about my self when I was through.