Reupholstering Dining Chairs

I'm finally getting around to posting about the dinning room chairs I recovered.  I'm so in love with them and can't wait to see them in our new house.  Let me back up a little bit...

When we were at my parents' house over Christmas we brought home a few furniture pieces that were family antiques.  I had always loved the round dining room table that was at my grandmother's house and mentioned to my dad that I would like to have it someday.  Since, at the time, my grandmother was in a nursing home, he told me we could go ahead and take it back to Atlanta with us since we had the trailer to bring back the other furniture.  We were originally planning to get new chairs for it because I remembered that the ones there were in pretty bad shape.  While we loading up the table Robby started inspecting the chairs and felt certain he could tighten them up and repair the ones that needed fixing, if I was up for recovering and using them.  I figured it was worth a shot to see how they turned out so we brought all 6 of the chairs home with us.

The table went into storage so I don't have any pictures of it, but we kept the chairs out so we could get to work on them. This is what they looked like to begin with.  Might be hard for some to see the inspiration, but so thankful that Robby convinced me to bring them with us.

I found fabric to use and loved the idea of a monogram on the backs of the chairs so after prying all of upholstered pieces off I cut fabric to fit over the current seats and backs and got busy monogramming.

Next, I visited JoAnn to get something to cushion the seats.  Over the years the foam that was there had really deteriorated and I wanted to make them really comfortable to sit on.  Again, I used the seat bottoms as a guide to cut the correct sizes.

In the mean time, Robby worked his magic with all sorts of wood glue, metal plates, L brackets and good old fashion elbow grease to make the chairs more sturdy than they were.

Finally we both worked together to add the new fabric.  I just left the old plaid on there since it wouldn't show and I figured it would save us a step. One of us pulled the fabric over the new cushion tight while the other staple gunned. It really was a two-person job to be able to get the fabric really tight and fitted looking, but it wasn't hard at all.

Robby screwed the seats back on the chairs and we glued the backs on and voila!  Our new (old) chairs!

It's amazing to me the difference in the BEFORE and AFTER:

It turns out this table and chairs originally came from my dad's grandmother's house, so my great-grandmother.  I love the history behind it and can remember sitting at the round table, looking over the waterway, while we ate suppers together at my grandparents' house. This will be our kitchen table and chairs and I know we will continue to have lots of wonderful family memories around this table.  My grandmother passed away a little over a month ago and now this furniture means more to me than it ever could have before. I am so excited to use it in our new house and just love the new look of the chairs.