How to Reupholster Dining Room Chairs

The seats are easy, comparatively speaking. I went over those steps, here.

The back is where we found things to get tricky, so I’m going to attempt to break down what we did.

The first step is to make sure your fabric, foam, and support strips are cut and arranged. Then, start stapling one layer at a time. The first piece, the back of the chair, needs to be small enough that it won’t interfere with stapling all the other layers down, so trim it if you have a lot of excess.

You’re working back to front so the bottom piece of fabric needs to be placed with the “right side” down since you’ll be seeing it from the back, not the front.

Then, layer on all the other pieces you’re using. You can see the correct order, below.

You’ll use the cardboard in the little groove to staple everything down in place. The cardboard helps hold it all smoothly as it curves. Again, your chair may have originally been covered without using this technique. I’d recommend trying to copy the previous upholstery technique specific to your chair.

Once you get that stapled in across the top (being careful to avoid wrinkles), fold the netting strip down and secure it at the bottom, too. Then, it’s time to add the cushion. We used the old fabric to hold the cushion in place by folding it down over the cushion and stapling it in place along the sides. Just be sure you don’t staple it too far out. You’ll want to be able to cover all of that with your top piece of fabric.

Then, it’s time to start on the sides. Our chairs used tack strips to hold the fabric in place, which we reused.

We found it was easiest to pull the fabric tight, but not too tight, and hold it over where the tack strip needs to be hammered in place.

Then, hold the fabric taught while pushing the tack strips through.

Finally, roll the tack strip, with the fabric attached now, in on itself (picture 3, below), and place it where it should go on the wood. It will be slightly tighter this time because the fabric is rolled over it. This gives you super tightly stretched fabric for a super smooth cushion, with hopefully no wrinkles.

1. 2.

3. 4.

Then, you’re ready to hammer it in place.

See how the tack strips, and thus, the fabric, is just outside where we secured the cushion? That’s perfect placement. (Not bragging, that was all Wyatt’s doing, not mine.)

Also, be sure to hammer your tack strips in carefully to keep from bending the tacks over, especially if you’re reusing the old ones like we were.

You can do the bottom of the cushion the same way, but we ended up just pulling it tight and stapling it to the underside of the chair back rail. (Chair is upside down in the photo below.)

It was a time consuming process (the seat cushions were MUCH faster) but I think it turned out great and I’m glad we did it. We were able to get eight like-new, custom dining room chairs for less than $100. A serious bargain considering new chairs would have been at least $50 a chair.