a life of firsts: New, Old Chairs

Labor Day Weekend Project

With the long holiday weekend approaching, last week my brain was busy thinking of all the projects I could do over the weekend. I am not the kind of person that sits still well. I always feel like I should be doing something. One thing on my list was to recover the dining room chairs. We have a very nice dining room set that was left in the house we are renting. The only problem (in my eyes) was the fabric on the chairs. It was a floral print that looked straight out of the 80s. I couldn't handle it.

I love when I get a GREAT project idea. (Travis on the other hand, not as much.)

First thing I had to do was measure the seat of the chairs to see how much fabric I would need. I measured one chair and then had my engineer (Trav) do all of the calculating to decide how big my piece of fabric would need to be. With my measurements in hand, I headed to Fargo.

I quickly had to purchase a staple gun and was off to the fabric store. In my mind, I had pictured a nice, fresh grey and white chevron fabric for my chairs. As I wandered the aisles of JoAnn's Fabric, my hopes began to diminish. I saw a super cute lime green chevron fabric but could not figure out how to make that work in the dining room. I walked one more aisle and there it was! The exact grey and ivory chevron I had been picturing. And even better...it was 50% off!!!! I think it was my lucky day!

I bought the fabric and headed home. My first step was to iron the fabric so that there would be no wrinkles once I had it on my seats.

Next, I needed to take all of the seats off the chairs. This was so simple. I just flipped them over then unscrewed the seat from the frame. Note the original look of the chairs.

Then I need to cut the fabric. I tried to line my measurement up on the point of the chevon so I could keep my line straight. I cut the fabric into three long pieces then cut those in half to get my six pieces.

Now it came time to staple. I centered the chair seat on my piece of fabric. Notice that I left the old fabric on. I was nervous that if I took it off, the padding would also come off. Starting on one strait side, I stapled the fabric. I did all of the straight sides, making sure to pull it tight, then went back and did the corners.

For the corners, I pulled the sides together then folded the corner point straight towards the middle of the board.

I stapled any extra sides/areas that might've been sticking out.

Here is a before and after of the seats. I am loving them so far! (I was absolutely giddy at this point. Travis could barely stand me. I kept asking him to screw the chairs back together for me because I was so excited to have them done.)