How to Reupholster an Antique Chair

For generations this dining set has been passed down through my family, and to this day it has the original fabric on it. As you could imagine, after over a hundred years, fabric is bound to be in pretty rough shape! Because of this, I decided to reupholster them to make them look relatively presentable again. Having this done by a profession would have been incredibly pricy, so I took matters into my own hands - and so can you!

The supplies that you will need are:

1. your choice of fabric
2. a hammer, drill, or screwdriver
3. a staple or nail gun
4. upholstery foam (you can use batting as well, or both which is what I did)
5. scissors
6. a marker or pencil
7. a serrated knife or box cutter
8. dust cover (optional)
9. measuring tape (optional)
10. pliers (optional)

A very simple step! Select the chair that you're planning on reupholstering. As you can see, the seat on mine was in rough shape.

Flip your chair over and determine how the seat is secured to the chair. Typically, they will be attached with four screws in each corner of the seat. Use your screwdriver to unscrew each of those and separate the seat from the chair, moving the frame of the chair to the side until the end of the project.

With your screwdriver or the claw side of your hammer, you'll want to push underneath the old nails that are securing the fabric to the seat, and then push up to essentially dig them out of the old wood. While pliers are not an essential part of the supplies for this project, when it got to this step, I'd find that some of the nails only wanted one side to free itself from the wood, leaving me with half of a nail sticking straight out of the wood. At this point, I headed off to dig in the garage for a pair of pliers to grip onto those remaining nails and pull them out, because it was just exhausting to do with my bare hands. If you can make a step easier, why not do it, right?

Once you've removed the old fabric, you'll be left with the ancient remains of whatever used to be the cushion inside of your seat. I have seen some antique chairs stuffed with just a bit of padding and straw, so I was quite lucky to just find slightly disheveled foam. If you're as lucky as me, you can use that foam as a pattern to simply outline the shape and size onto your new foam and batting. If you are not as lucky as me, this is where you would need the measuring tape to measure the width and length of the wood of your seat to perfectly mark and cut out the right size for your cushioning.

1. Tip: Batting can be easily cut with scissors, however the foam is much more easily cut with the serrated knife or box cutter.

Place your cushion down, and cut the fabric around it, leaving approximately 2 to 3 inches of empty fabric between the cushion and the edge of the fabric. There needs to be enough fabric all around the cushion to fold over all the layers of the cushioning and wood, as well as be pulled tightly and stapled down without too much of a struggle.

To make securing the fabric around the whole seat as simple as possible, start with one single staple in the center of each side of the seat. Make sure you are pulling all sides taut so that the final result looks as smooth as possible.

After you have the single central staple in all four sides, start from that staple and work outwards, pulling the fabric tightly as you go, and shooting a staple approximately every centimeter. Do this to all four sides until only the corners are left unstapled.

1. Tip: do not staple too far into the corners when you're doing the sides, if you do, it will make Step 8 a lot more difficult!

Folding the corners properly honestly takes a bit of maneuvering. It's a bit like wrapping a present, but it will require patience and probably a bit of cutting off excess fabric as well. If you have left enough room from Step 7, you should not have a problem folding side A down underneath side B and simply laying side B on top of side A, folding the excess fabric from side B underneath itself and stapling it down nicely.

1. Side A and side B have been annotated in the photos for a better visual explanation!

This is not a completely necessary step, however I chose not to add a dust cover - a very thin cotton material that goes underneath fabric to prevent dust from collecting inside of it. With a dust cover, trimming the edges wouldn't be necessary because it would cover it, but this is where you would need to add it! You would simply cut it to size and staple it around the entire bottom of the seat, covering all of the unsightly edges and staples from the upholstery installation. Since my chair is solid on the bottom and has beams that cover much of the fabric underneath anyway, I'm not worried about it being noticed so I just left it as is and trimmed the excess.

Get the chair frame and align it correctly with the seat, making sure it's aligned exactly where it was before so you have the holes for the screws in the right place. Take the four screws that you removed from the chair at the beginning, and screw them back into their rightful places. Make sure they're all secure before picking the chair up again!

Set your chair down on the floor, take a step back, and admire how nice your newly upholstered seat looks! Taking before and after pictures is always a great thing to do, because you can really see how much better something looks after you've put work into it and it feels incredibly rewarding. That's what DIY is all about!