Frugal Decorating DIY: Recovering chair seats.

When looking for secondhand furniture try to keep an open mind, don't be distracted by the color or finish of a piece, those things are easy to change.
In this case we found these MCM chairs for free on Gumtree, they were kinda gross and wobbly but now they are clean and waxed with fresh seat covers.  Here is my little tutorial on how to give a fresh new look to some beat up old chairs for under £5. 

The seat covers were gross, but free is free, first I flipped the chairs over and removed the screws holding the seat to the chair frame.

Remove the seat  from the chair, in these MCM chairs there were four screws that went up through the sides and into the seat base.

Chair skeleton!


Remove the old fabric, usually attached with staples and/or glue.  I used a screw driver as a wedge and a pair of pliers to pry out the staples.

Pliers! It helps that we have tools handy for the cottage renovations.    

Use the old seat cover as a guide for tracing out the new one, adding a few inches to the dimensions.  

You don't want to risk cutting it to small and wasting the fabric.  

Cut out the new fabric.  

Mine was a charity shop find for only £2 and originally a set of bed sheets, which I bought to re-purpose for this project. 

The foam seat pads were actually in great shape so I was able to keep them for now.

Lay the fabric right side down, and line the seat up on top of it, so that the underside of the chair is facing up. 

Grab your handy dandy staple gun.  

Matt got me this one for this project, but we considered the cost negligible because we will get so much use out of it.  

This was not an easy photo to take.

Pull the new fabric back over the edges of the chair to staple down, start with one staple in the center of each side, then double check that it isn't bunching up on the front.  You want the fabric to lay flat and be pulled taught. 

One staple in each side, then you can start to work out to the corners, pulling the fabric taught and stapling down as you go.

When you reach the corners, fold them up neatly, pull tight and staple.  when the new seat cover is secured you are ready to reassemble the chair. 

Finally, reattach the seat to the chair frame, you should be able to use the original screws and holes.  

I was pretty pleased with the result, though I plan to eventually recover them with a more durable fabric.

Total cost of this project was about £5 and an afternoon with my staple gun, plus the generosity of Matt's grandparents who fixed the wobbly chairs and polished them to look like new.

-Nicole