So even though my refinishing of a dining room table was a bust, I wasn’t ready to give up on the dream of Restoration Hardware-inspired dining room pieces.
We tried our hands at stripping the table, and that didn’t work. So we built a new table. But we did still need chairs, and we had the matching upholstered chairs just asking for a makeover. Much like our inspiration for the original table, we wanted our chairs to look something like this:
Photo from Restoration Hardware, Vintage French Round Upholstered Dining Chair
But this time, we weren’t going to try stripping the wood — we were just going to paint it (even though that wouldn’t look quite the same). Then, with some new fabric, we reckoned that the chairs would be close to our inspiration.
Here was our starting point. Not bad for a general match to the RH inspiration, right? At least in terms of shape.
I went out and got fabric – I went with a natural colored linen to match the inspiration, and sprung for actual linen, rather than cheaper “linen look” alternatives.
Then I flipped the chair over, expecting to unscrew the seat so I could staple the new material right over top of the existing fabric – easy. I figured I could knock out this project in a few minutes, tops. But of course I encountered an unforeseen obstacle (just like with the matching dining table) — the chair was not a simple wooden seat with foam and fabric on top. There were springs and burlap and a fabric stapled directly to the frame. *Sigh*.
So here were the three paths I could choose (in my mind):
- Go ahead and try to reupholster it the “right” way — but this would require much more skill than I think I have. And probably getting piping to cover up the staples. I don’t know how to do that.
- Take it to an upholstery shop and have them do it for me — this would require more money than I was willing to spend.
- Take the current spring / burlap / padding / fabric out, and create a wooden seat with foam that I could staple to — this will require spending more money (on the wood and foam), and may not end up looking nice.
I guess there could be a fourth option — abandon this project — but I really need some dining chairs, and I already got the fabric. Yes, that’s a sunk cost and shouldn’t factor into my decision, but still….
In a surprise twist ending, I decided to go with option #1. I say that’s a surprise because I am usually the path-of-least-resistance person (or “lazy” as others might call it). But I figured I had nothing to lose from properly restoring it. If I botched the job, I could always take the whole seat apart and move on to option #3.
After a lot of googling around for “dining chair reupholstering”, I settled on the following method:
Step 1: Remove the current fabric
First, I tried pulling the piping / cording (what’s the proper name?), and discovered it was glued onto the fabric. But with gentle tugging, it came off. Then I used pliers, my hands, and brute force to remove the fabric from the seat, which was stapled all the way around. Honestly, I ended up ripping the fabric more than removing all of the staples, but in the end I was happy about that, since the burlap, padding, and cotton of the seat was in good enough shape that I wanted to preserve all of it. Removing the staples would have meant putting that all back together, too.
I saved the intact seat fabric to use as a template for cutting my new fabric.
Step 2: Paint the frame
After an unsuccessful attempt at stripping and refinishing the dining table, we took the easy way out and painted the chair. I chose Annie Sloan’s Chalk Paint in Paris Gray, because I had it on hand, and I wanted to go for a grayish-wood, french-country-cottage look. Also, I knew I could water it down to do a thinner, more wash-like coat.
The coat is mostly solid, and I will probably go back and distress the finish with sandpaper a bit, so some of the wood color shows through.
Step 3: Reupholster
We used a natural-colored linen, with a layer of muslin underneath (since the linen is thin and has a somewhat loose weave, but it’s expensive enough that we didn’t want to double up on the linen).
As for how we attached it — it was basically pull & staple, pull & staple, pull & staple. It was all-hands-on-deck, so one of us pulled the fabric taut while the other stapled into the seat frame with the staple gun. We did a few key points around the chair, then went back and stapled down the rest.
After enough staples were in, we simply cut off the excess fabric, right underneath the staple line. In theory this will get covered up with matching piping, but I don’t know how to do that (yet), so for now we’re going to leave it in it’s unfinished … er… rustic state.
Whew! One chair down, 5 more to go …
Also, the dogs seem to like it (but then, they liked it before, too). Any place they can sit and make sure we’re looking at them is good in their book.