Re-covered Dining Chairs

starting with the pretty picture because the before picture is soooo bad

I bought two green chairs 6+ years ago from World Market. You can see them in this post about the second kitchen table I built.



While comfortable, the fabric has not weathered well. The kiddos have little by little picked most of the outer green layer off the inner layer. And then they spill stuff all over them. They've been looking very gross for way too long.

We were going to buy new chairs, but in the interest of saving our budget, I decided to recover the chairs instead. They really are quite comfortable to sit on. I thought about buying fabric, but then I rembered I had some upholstery fabric that I'd bought to recover a wingback chair. I never got around to doing it, and now I don't plan on doing so until we move into our next house, so the fabric was just sitting around.

While I used fabric we already had, I know it's not the greatest for kitchen chairs. Outdoor fabric would have been better, but I was trying to do this without spending any money. Since the fabric isn't intended for dining chairs, I am a bit concerned about how the gray fabric will survive what the kiddos do to it. I bought some clear vinyl to go over the seat portion of the chairs, but it only cost a couple dollars. That was the only expense for this project since I had the fabric, staples, and thread already.

Rather than screwing the seat bottom to the frame, they used pieces of green webbing to hold it in place. Spoiler: it was a pain to try to get them reattached tightly.

After removing all the staples that were in the way, recovering the seat was fairly straightforward. I just wrapped the fabric around the seat and stapled it in place.

Before I attached the seat to the frame, I also wrapped the clear vinyl over the gray fabric and stapled it in place. I do have my doubts about how long it will take for the vinyl to crack and get peeled off, but something is better than nothing.

Once the seats were done, I took them downstairs and sewed covers for the back cushions. They're not perfect, but they turned out pretty well. The fabric had a weird plastic-y backing that gummed up my needle and was a pain to sew through. I very quickly got to the point where I was just trying to get them to look decent. 

There are seams on the sides and top, and then staples hold it all in place on the underside.

And one last before and after:

So much better!