Live Cheap and Large at Home: How to Recover a Dining Room Chair Seat and Back

Our dining room chairs (bought at an office furniture sale) were sturdy, but ugly green upholstery spoiled their looks. We’d waited years for them to wear out, but they didn’t seem to want to wear, so my husband and I took drastic measures.

I found five yards of a neutral slipcover-weight fabric and Jo-Ann Fabrics: on clearance, and half price, it came to $2.50 a yard!

Unscrewing the backs and seats turned out to be easy. (Especially easy for me: Bill did it.) We found that each frame, seat and back had a number on it, and we were careful to keep the right pieces together.

Making certain to have the weave going in the same direction on each, I laid the chair seats, one at a time, on the fabric to see how big a piece to cut. After cutting, I used a heavy-duty stapler to attach the fabric around the piece of plywood, doing first the center staples on opposite sides, then the centers of the other two sides, then a goodly number of staples in between. You stretch the cloth taut as you do it, and it conforms to the shape of the seat or back. Even the curved shape of these pieces made no trouble.

Using a non-electric staple gun, I probably had to pull out and re-do as many staples as I left in! An electric one is probably easier on the hands, as well.

I folded the corners in neat pleats; two or three small pleats seemed to work better than one large one on each corner.

Having cut the cloth large, since I wanted to be sure of having enough to tug on, excess had to be cut off after stapling.

You may notice that I did not mention removing the old fabric before putting on the new. That’s because I didn’t. The new fabric was totally opaque, and none of the old showed through, nor did the increased thickness seem to make any difference, so I saved myself some work and gained a little extra padding.

Another thing I didn’t bother with was taking off the thin black scrim that originally finished off the chair bottoms neatly. They aren’t as neat underneath now, but my friends don’t generally turn my chairs over and look at the bottoms!

Putting the chairs back together was no trouble, even though the screws had to go through the new fabric here and there.

Tools: Screwdriver to take chairs apart and put back together. Measuring tape or yardstick. Shears. Staple gun. Vise-grip pliers (extremely handy for getting out the staples you put in wrong, or in the wrong place). Hammer (extremely handy for bashing in the staples that didn’t go far enough.)

Result – four “new” chairs for Thanksgiving, for $12.50. (Plus tax. Plus another ten bucks for the can of Scotchgard I bought yesterday. Plus an evening’s work.) Good deal!