Hesselblogger: Weekend Project - How to Re-cover Your Dining Room Chairs

This weekend, Matt and I decided to tackle one of our projects from our to-do list: re-covering the seat cushions of our dining room chairs. A few years back, we were given a huge, beautiful Crate & Barrel table with ten chairs from a friend of my aunt's. At the time, our house was too small for the furniture, so we stored part of it at Kim's house and part of it in our attic. In our new house, there is a dedicated dining room, which was one of the many draws of the place for me when we were house-hunting. I have always dreamed of hosting big family or friend meals at a nice table big enough for everyone! So the table has been set up in the new dining room for the whole four months we have been living here, but our goal to get the cushions re-covered got pushed to the back burner. This weekend, we finally felt the motivation to get the project off of our to-do list!

Here is what the cushions looked like before:

Yup. Gold. With tiny Asian people... fishing, maybe? Lovely for some, I'm sure, but not our style and not fitting for the decor in our home. Plus, it felt a little weird/racist to be sitting on those nice Asian people's faces :) It was time for them to go. So we headed over to the fabric store to pick out a new pattern. I found a nice, cream-colored linen with a very subtle floral pattern all over it. From afar, it just looks like a plain, neutral fabric, but once you get closer you can see the detail. Perfect for a house where we are trying to balance my love for all things girlie with Matt's desire to not live in pink and purple flowery cloud.


Close-Up of the Fabric

After that the real work began:

Step 1: Remove the Cushions from the Chairs

This went really fast - just take a power drill on reverse and remove all of the screws holding the cushions onto the chair frames. Set the screws aside for later.

Step 2: Remove the Old Covers from the Cushions

This took a while and was a tedious little task. Good thing I secretly want to work on an assembly line and don't mind mindless work at all! I took a flat head screwdriver and pried up the old staples. All 600 of them between the ten chairs. For any staples that wouldn't come out willingly, I took a pair of pliers and gave them a light yank. Hardest part of this step was keeping track of all of the flying staples as I popped them off one by one. I would recommend vacuuming right after this step :)

Prying up the staples

Sooo many staples...

Step 3: Cutting the Fabric

Next it was time to cut the new fabric into the correct size. We measured the old swatches of fabric that we had just removed to use as a template, since that seemed to be the easiest way to get an accurate size. You could also lay the cushions on the fabric and give yourself 1-2 inches of hangover as well. Once I had cut all 10 pieces of fabric to size, I threw them into the steam dryer to get the creases out. You could also iron the fabric once it's cut, but I don't own an ironing board and I'm a little lazy :)

Step 4: Covering the Chairs with the New Fabric

This step takes the longest and is probably the most difficult part. The best way to do it is to have someone help you by stretching the fabric while you put the new staples in place. We set the cushions onto the fabric pieces (making sure the correct side of the fabric would be facing up once everything was stapled down!) Then I stretched the first side over the cushion while Matt added staples about half an inch apart all along the side. You could use less staples, but they are cheap and it guarantees that your fabric will stay in place. Then we just moved around the sides of the cushion, stretching and stapling until everything was on tight. The most important thing here is to make sure you are smoothing the fabric as you stretch it to ensure you don't have any visible creases on the cushion tops. This is trickiest on the corners, which is why it's helpful to have a second pair of hands and eyes to ensure you're getting it right. Once everything is stapled down, I cut away the excess fabric (without getting too close to the staples - otherwise they could tear through the linen and ruin your tight cover). Repeat for all 10 chairs.

Step 5: Re-Attach Cushions to Chairs

Lastly, we screwed all of the cushions back onto their chair frames. I held the cushions in place and made sure none of the fabric excess hung over, while Matt did the drilling. Some of the screws or chairs were a little funky and wouldn't re-attach. Over the years, screws would sporadically fall out, and we were hoping to avoid this in the future. So for the ones that didn't fit quite right, Matt added some Liquid Nails to make sure the cushions stayed attached to the frames.

And that was it! The whole project start to finish took us about three hours start to finish for all 10 chairs. And the end result is lovely! I love how my dining room looks now and I can't wait to host people for the first time at our new and improved table!