Giving Old Chairs a New Life

We bought these chairs about fifteen years ago.  I paid $50 for six chairs.  Originally I liked the oak and never thought about painting them.  But after a recent move I thought they needed something more than just newly covered seats.  They serve as our dining room chairs but as you can see from the first picture, the dining room serves as the art room, the sewing room, the workbench, the office, etc.  The chairs get quite a bit of use and are mildly abused.  When we decided to move, I scoured furniture stores for new dining room chairs.  I couldn't, however, find anything that I loved and new chairs seemed to be at least $200 each.  That would have cost more than $1,200!  Thus, I decided to keep these and spend less than $100 total on new fabric and new paint.

This is a "before" photo of the chairs that was used in the real estate listing for our old house.  You can see how worn the oak had become and the chair fabric was a bit dated.

These chairs get a lot of use.

The chairs originally came from Spiegel in Chicago.  Unfortunately Spiegel has changed quite a bit since then and doesn't sell furniture any longer. 

After taking all of the seats off the chairs, I gave them a nice shiny coat of black paint.  I like to use an oil based paint because I think it wears better, but newer water based paint is easier to clean up.

We re-enforced all of the corner brackets with glue and new screws.

Small corner brackets were used for extra stability.

I didn't bother removing the old cover because the stuffing for the cushion had been replaced the last time we re-covered them.

I used pinking shears on the edge of the cover to prevent unraveling but an edge could be put on with a sewing machine for a more finished look.  We carefully stapled the new fabric to the bottom of the chair.

We put new chair pads on all of the legs in order to prevent scratching the floor.

It was too difficult to choose fabric because there were so many that we liked!  We decided on six different coordinating fabrics.

The finished product was truly an easy fix.  We're very happy with the way they turned out.