Reupholstering a Dining Chair (a.k.a my first pictorial tutorial)

We wanted to sell our old kitchen dining set because with Bee no longer in a high chair it was too small for us. However, from wear and tear of 3+ kiddos the original white upholstered seats, looked like this...

This grey color was after me scrubbing with various cleaners. You can only imagine how bad it was before, but trust me, it was bad. So, while the white seat cushions were okay in their original state, these grayish hued seats were not working for me and  I figured buyers probably wouldn't like them either.

Something like this seemed a bit more appealing...

This project was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be. Once I had figured out how to dismantle the seat of the chair, it seriously only took me about 15 minutes per seat to dismantle, recover, and reassemble. Let's just say I was super proud of myself. :) So, I'm going to try a step by step picture tutorial of how I did these. (My very first tutorial I might add.) You'll need plenty of material (I used maybe a 1/3 of an old $5 red vinyl tablecloth), a scissors or rotary blade, a cutting mat, a staple gun and staples, screwdriver (preferably one with a magnetic tip), and a plastic baggie. First, figure out which screws on the bottom of the chair hold the cushion to the seat. After accidentally removing all the legs on my chair, I realized that the three screws on the sides of the seat were what needed to be removed not the legs. Oops.  

The holes to the screws are fairly deep so a magnetic tip screwdriver helps to pull the screw out of the hole after you've unscrewed it. Put the screws in a plastic baggie. Trust me don't skip this step, otherwise you'll spend 30 minutes just looking for that one screw that rolled off the counter top and your daughter decided to take into the other room. Just sayin'...

After you've taken a second to be both proud and a little freaked out that you just dismantled the chair, lay the seat cushion-side down on your wrong-side up material. I just kind of eyeballed this next part. I pulled up one edge to make sure it would wrap over the edge and still have extra to staple to the seat. From there, I just eyeballed the same width around the seat and cut out the shape, rounding the corners.

Then, just fold over the edge and start stapling with the staple gun. I started with one side of the seat. Then stretched the fabric across and stapled on the other side. Then, I did the front of the seat. Then, the backside last. Make sure your material is smooth and taut across the seat cushion. Nobody likes a wrinkly seat. :) If you are using a cotton based fabric I would pull it hard and tight. Since, I was using this lightweight vinyl I couldn't pull it too hard because it would stretch. So, I just had to make sure it was smooth.

After you've stapled the two sides, you'll have a front and back end left. Since the corners aren't perfect 90 degree angles you have to fold around the curves. You can kind of see here that I folded the corners in at an angle first, before pulling up the front edge. After all four sides are stapled down, take your baggie of screws and reattach the seat to the frame. If your screws don't go through the fabric on their own, trying poking a hole through the fabric where the screw holes are first. Voila! Newly recovered seats ready to take on spills or just look pretty.

Now, why didn't I do that sooner? Seriously, it would have been a lot easier to take care of this little yogurt and popsicle lover's messes on vinyl seats than on white fabric. Oh well...