The great chair re-covering project

After many days, the Great Chair Re-Covering project is complete!

It started out with six chairs that had bottom seat cushions that were really worn out. These chairs belonged to my grandparents and were chairs that my dad remembers from when he was a little boy. These are OLD chairs.

I had bought some seat cushions, but wasn't really happy with the idea of ripping off the old fabric and hardened/disintegrated foam, just to stick a cushion on top of the seat base, so I did a little exploring, and the creativity kicked in. I'm pretty proud of the fact that I did this on my own, with a little help from the internet.

Here's my Jennie's blog-o-rama How to Replace a Chair Cushion

1. So here's a picture of the chair in the "before" state. You can see the fabric on the chair is pretty ratty. What you can't see is how awful this cushion feels on the behind--like sitting on concrete!

2. The first step is un-screwing the base of the seat from the chair. Not too hard, just requires a screwdriver. But what a good excuse to use my cordless drill! Yay for Power Tools!

3. Once the cushion has been separated, the next step is the tedious part--removing eleventybillion tiny hardware nails to remove the fabric from the chair. My friend here is, again, the screwdriver. The nails were so tiny, that a hammer wasn't helpful at prying the nails out. This was the most time consuming step of the whole thing.

4. Next step is cutting the foam. If your chairs have a square base, this part is super easy. You can buy pre-cut high-density chair pad foam at craft stores like JoAnn. Since my chairs are semi-circular, a square foam pad, just wouldn't work. I ended up buying 3 yards of 2" foam from JoAnn. Happily, I had a 50% off coupon, so my foam only cost $33. Now, cutting the giant long foam sheet into perfect cushion pieces was the most complicated step. It required buying a new "power tool", an electric knife (like the kind some people use to carve up their Thanksgiving dinner). There really is no other way to cut the foam and have smooth surfaces--maybe if I had a fancy electric saw, but I don't.

5. Next step is cutting the fabric. The handy way to figure out how much fabric is measure your cushion and the depth of your foam. You need your fabric to = length of cushion + (3 x depth of foam). My cushions are 18" x 18" (counting the longest dimensions on the semi-circle). My foam was 2" deep, so I needed my fabric to be 18 + (3x2) = 24" long and 24" wide. I also got my fabric from there, which was also on sale, so I got 2 yards of 54" fabric for $20. I was able to cut this into 6 pieces that were 24" x 24"

6. To assemble the cushion you'll either need a hammer and eleventy billion little nails or buy a fancy new heavy duty staple gun like I did. You put the fabric face down on a flat surface (the floor), put the foam on top of the fabric, and put the chair bottom on top of the foam, and then staple or nail the fabric onto the wood seat bottom. The hardest part was remembering to try to keep the fabric tight, and to be careful to be tidy on the corners and around the curvy parts. OH, and don't staple the fabric over the holes you need to screw the base back onto the chair! Luckily, I didn't, but I did need to trim the fabric around those holes.

Aside: The last time I did this much work with a staple gun, I was preparing picket signs for a strike...oh those good ol' UAW days!

7. After the cushion is assembled, screw the new seat back onto the chair, sit, and enjoy! I'm pretty pleased that the entire project cost about $75, and now I have new comfy, good-looking cushions, a staple gun and an electric knife!

To see more photos of this project see my online picasa album which also has pictures of food porn.