The Chair Project
Ever re-upholstered a chair? Neither have I - until today. There have been so many times when I've seen a nice piece of furniture at a yard sale or a thrift store and thought to myself, "if I could just change the fabric, it would look great in my house." Alas, I never bought any of those pieces because I convinced myself it wouldn't be worth the time or effort to try and re-upholster anything myself.
Then, about a month ago, I came across the chair in the image below at a local thrift store. It is the perfect size and style for the third floor living space in my house - the one in desperate need of seating accommodations. Once again I thought to myself, "if it had new fabric..."
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| The six dollar chair |
The good news is the structure of the chair is sound, so no repairs were needed. The only thing that need attention, other than the fabric, was the seat cushion. While it didn't exactly cave in when it was sat in, it did not have much padding to speak of.
So, to get started with my project, I took a trip to my local Joann's fabric store and bought 2 yards of some pretty upholstery fabric and a 3 inch thick seat cushion.
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| new seat cushion |
Since I've never done anything like this before, I looked to Google for inspiration and instruction. I looked at a few "how to" websites and blogs and they all seemed to have different ways of re-upholstering chairs with varying degrees of difficulty. (I don't remember the names of the blogs, sorry! I promise to be better about references in the future.) I ended up using a combination of my own ideas and a few important tips I remembered from the Internet search.
First, I took off the old teal fabric. I did this using a flat-head screwdriver and a pair of pliers. The screwdriver was used to pry the old upholstery staples up and I used the pliers to pull out some of the more stubborn staples. Take care not to rip the fabric too much as you can use it as an outline to cut out the new fabric. Underneath the old teal fabric I discovered the original fabric.
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| original fabric |
The original fabric wasn't in bad shape; it was just ugly. I decided to do what the previous owner did and re-upholster right over it. I dusted and vacuumed the chair, and then got to work adding my new cushion. To add the cushion, I simply pulled back the springs underneath the chair and inserted the new cushion.
Next, I laid out my new upholstery fabric on a large flat surface and placed the old fabric on top of it. Pinning all the ends of the old fabric to the new provides a great (and easy) pattern outline to cut the fabric.
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| Pinning old fabric to new |
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| My assistant PeeWee |
The most challenging part comes after cutting out the fabric. Stretching and fitting the fabric over the chair requires both patience and skill. Patience I have...skill, not as much. There is probably a much better way of doing this, but I have yet to learn it so...
After cutting out the new fabric and removing the pins and old fabric, I placed the new fabric over the seat cushion and pulled the fabric as tight as I could to create smooth surfaces. What I found worked easiest, was to start with one end, pull the fabric tight, and then use my staple gun to hold the fabric on place. I always started with the back of the chair so that any mistakes I made were less visible. The tricky part is the corners, you have to fold the fabric over to create very small pleats.
The finished product came out pretty good for a first try, but it's not perfect. My corners aren't all exactly the same because I was tried a few different methods of folding, but that is something that I will correct with the next project. :)
Overall, it looks nice, it's functional, and most importantly it's cat approved.
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| Izzy approved |
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