How to Re-Upholster Dining Room Chairs

Re-upholstering chairs be a great way to change the look of your whole dining room just by changing the color or pattern of your seats. Once you are confident in how to re-cover chairs, you can buy a dining room set secondhand or re-vamp an inherited set rather than paying retail for new furniture.

While you could certainly take the chairs to an upholsterer, it is much more economical to complete this project on your own. A professional upholsterer will likely charge about $40 to re-cover a dining room chair, which you will see is quite a simple task. Your kitchen set of 4 chairs would cost you $160 in that case, and a dining room set of 6 would cost $240 to re-finish. You will also have to go through the hassle of finding the right professional, and possibly transporting the chairs to and from their establishment.

The finished products

Re-Upholstering Made Easy

You'll need just a few materials to get started:

• A staple gun (with staples, of course)
• Several yards of upholstery fabric (more on estimating the amount later)
• A screwdriver
• New foam for the seats, if your old foam has lost its fluff

The supplies used to re-upholster a set of kitchen chairs (minus fabric).

We re-covered 4 kitchen chair seats using upholstery fabric purchased from a discount fabric store. We enlisted the assistance of a shop attendant, who advised us that we could buy 1 1/2 yards of fabric to cover the set of four chairs, but we decided to purchase 2 1/4 yards in order to have some extra fabric in case of any mistakes. We did not need new seat foam. The total cost for the upholstery fabric was $6.93 (tax included).

Before - these chairs were bought secondhand 

and had already been covered in this taupe fabric.

Steps to Re-Upholster a Chair

1. Remove the seat from the chair. The seats are likely to be screwed on and you will therefore need a screwdriver.

2. Mark the holes for the screws so that you can avoid covering those areas with fabric. We used a toothpick to indicate the hole and marked the opening with silver Sharpie.

Here we have removed the seat from the chair,

pulled off the old fabric (the chairs were already

reupholstered once), and marked the holes.

3. Remove the old fabric from the chair (optional). While you may be able to layer the new fabric over the old, if the chairs have been covered over before, as ours were, the fabric will start to pile up.

4. Lay out your fabric and place the cushion on top of it (sitting side down). Cut out a piece of fabric large enough to stretch easily around the entire top of the seat. This is more of an art than a science as you can fold over any excess fabric.

We used a generous piece of fabric and folded over
the edges instead of using exact measurements.

5. Stretch the fabric tightly around all edges of the set and secure to the flat backing using a staple gun. This step is most easily completed with two people so one of you can stretch the fabric taut and the other can staple away.

Make sure the fabric is stretched taut around the seat!

6. Neaten up any excess fabric on the back by folding over the edges and stapling them down.

Neatening up the edges.

6. Reattach the seat to the chair frame.

The finished product!

Further Tips:

• Pay close attention to the appearance of the corners as you staple the fabric tightly around the cushion. Make sure you gather and secure the fabric around corners.
• Spray the finished chair seats with Scotchgard to make them stain-resistant.