DIY Dining Room Chair Upholstery

The dining room is coming along so nicely! Now that I’m done refinishing the console table in here, it was time to work on the dining room chairs. I bought these chairs from Target over a year ago..they’ve been in storage the entire time! I’ve been wanting dining chairs with velvet upholstery, but I couldn’t find any that I liked that were also affordable…classic! So, I found this beautiful rusty red fabric and decided to upholster these dining room chairs myself!

While I couldn’t find any upholstered chairs in my price range, I did find these chairs which were! The silhouette is perfect so I came up with a plan to make them myself. Here’s the vibe I was going for:

Base

First, I traced the chairs and made stencils out of scrap hardboard and my jigsaw. This would be the base of my cushion! Next, I cut my foam and glued it to the MDF board. A little note: in the end, I decided to use plywood because I’d need these cushions to be able to bend to the chair.

Upholstering

I first tried sewing together some fabric, making a case for the base to slide into…it looked HORRIBLE! The whole point of sewing it was to avoid the upholstered/folded look. Haha. I ended up deciding to do a little tuck & fold with staples.

Then, I stapled the batting to my base and then the fabric and this was looking way better. I made sure to pull the fabric suuuuper tight when I stapled. Then, I stapled down the corners and cut down the excess.

Chair Assembly

To attach the cushions to these chairs, I decided to use construction adhesive and some screws. I glued them down, put weights on the cushions, then used my drill to secure them.

How good do these look?! We just had a game night the other night using the chairs and they were SO COMFY! They are so comfortable and the color is absolutely perfect. It’s such a great contrast with all of the blue in here.