How to Re-Cover a Dining Room Chair with Coffee Sacks—Fixer Upper Friday

That moment when you find that perfectly shaped thrift store chair that looks like it was custom made by a carpenter just for you, but it’s the wrong color and the cushion fabric doesn’t match anything you own (or anything that you’d want to own). Broken dreams for sure. Fortunately, painting and reupholstering a chair is probably one of the easiest DIY projects you’ll ever do.

I recently got a hold of some wooden chairs that I absolutely adore, but they really needed some tlc. They were almost identical to this one pictured below.

I knew that I wanted the chairs to have a farmhouse feel, so I decided to paint them white with a little bit of distressing a la Joanna Gaines (love you, girl!). I was struggling with my fabric choice, until I remembered that I still had some of those coffee sacks (find them here) that I had used for other projects. I was a little bit worried that the burlap would be too rough for use as upholstery fabric, but fortunately I was dead wrong. The result: the most beautiful little dining room chairs I’ve ever had! Here’s a step by step for reupholstering your own. Totally easy and totally worth it.

How to Reupholster Dining Room Chairs

• Remove seat cushion from chair frame and original fabric from cushion.
• Place seat frame face down on fabric.
• Trace three inches out from edge of cushion around entire frame using temporary fabric pen. Cut along line.

• Attach fabric to frame using staple gun. Begin by stapling fabric to frame at the center point of each side, and then at each corner, pulling fabric tautly around frame.

• After sides and corners are stapled in place, continue securing fabric to frame by working from center point to each corner. Pull fabric snugly around curved corners to eliminate tucks on top side of cushion. Trim any excess fabric.

• After seat cushion is covered with new fabric, reattach to chair frame using original hardware.

Source: How to Re-Cover a Dining Room Chair

Image Credit: adiamondinthestuff