DIY - Reupholster Dining Room Chairs

We discovered we needed a new dining room table when E invited his whole family over for lunch in the not so distant future.  Doing the math with our seating options, I quickly discovered we did not have the space to seat more than six people, max.

I also desperately wanted a hutch to put in all of my Nana's gorgeous china.  From my quick review online, I realized that this was going to be expensive if we didn't do it on Kijiji.

I found the most amazing antique hutch in the world, that came with a nice dining room table with two extension leafs, and six chairs.  One of the chairs even had arms on it.  I was in love.



Original fabric - Salmon Tulips?

However.... the pattern on the chairs was a different story.  When we were looking at the set, the woman proudly told me that it had been recently re-upholstered. I could tell from looking around her very beautiful home that it was re-upholstered to her tastes, not mine.  Fortunately I still have one picture of the fabric... basically a salmon pink with weird little blue flowers on it.  We scooped up the set and I set to work researching how hard it was to re-upholster dining room chairs.

The answer?  It is shockingly easy to do!

I recommend watching some youtube videos, such as this one or that one. It was honestly so easy.  The only investment you'll likely need to make it a staple gun and some new fabric, depending on the quality of the stuffing in the chairs (because these had been re-upholstered recently, I didn't need new foam).



Using a "tool" to take out the staples

Basically, you start by popping out (or in my case, unscrewing) the fabric seats.  Then you flip them over and start taking out the staples.  This was a painful process as there was a LOT of staples.  From what I can tell, whoever re-upholstered these chairs was about as much of a professional as I was, and probably didn't bother to watch the aforementioned very helpful youtube videos.

I didn't take pictures of the whole process - at the time, I was really just obsessed with getting this done in time. The youtube videos will honestly show you the steps to follow. I will say that after I did it, I felt less nervous about the colour I chose because now I know that if I don't like it in five years I can just pop them off and change them!  It is quite liberating to know that I have that option.

The one thing I still have left to deal with is that bench...