Reupholstered chairs

My grandparents were so gracious in giving us their old table and chairs. We however, wanted to make it into our own. I casually mentioned we should reupholster the chairs, and Matt was all for it. So the next weekend before I knew it we were out buying fabric and supplies to complete our task. I couldn't find any great instructions online so we just kind of winged it. The tips from this lady did help and put me at ease: http://www.motherearthnews.com/diy/how-to-reupholster-furniture-zmaz74ndzraw.aspx. 

Here is our before and after.

 

Matt took apart two of the chairs and we used those as our pattern. We went to our local fabric shop to take a look around. I knew I wanted a brown to match our couch, rug and place mats. We really wanted microfiber but could not find any during our quick shopping. Let's face it, anytime you take a man shopping, whatever is close enough to what you want that you find in the first five minutes is what you are getting. (But I am really happy with the fabric we ended up choosing.) We also do not own a sewing machine. I know most people don't sew when reupholstering furniture, but these chairs were sewn before so we thought we would do it again. We found a place to rent a sewing machine and we were ready to go!

We cut the new material the same dimensions as the old ones. Those dimensions were not real accurate which furthered my beliefs that we could do this!

We reused the padding that was on the chair before. I dusted them off because they smelled pretty bad but were still in good shape. New padding is expensive!! We had some problems along the way, like we didn't know how to use a sewing machine...So once we got the figured out we were golden. Our seam lines are definitely not straight, but sewing did make it look a lot more professional. We just followed the exact same pattern that was on there before. We sewed everything together. We were definitely not perfect, and they worked out! We bought an electric staple gun to staple the material to the chairs with 1/2" staples. Use lots of staples and you cannot go wrong! We chose the electric gun just to make sure we had enough power. We had several mess ups and were able to hide them well. If I could do it different, I would add more padding to ours. My grandparents had the brown cushions they put on top of the chairs because there was not a lot of padding to begin with. We did not account for that when we cut our patterns so we didn't think we could add padding later. But the cushions would match our new chairs if we need them! We don't sit on them a whole lot so that isn't a huge issue for us! We are happy with them because it was a great project we got to do on our own. Enjoy and happy crafting!

Our finished product!