DIY – How to revamp dining chairs and Stools

Reupholstering and painting old chairs and stools can really give a new lease of life to old furniture, allow you to draw colour schemes together in a room and save a lot of money on buying new furniture. Also many older furniture items like this are well made and solid, so reupholstering them makes more sense often than buying new furniture if you don’t have a lot of money to spend, as at the end you will have something that is solid and will last well, and of course if you want to change the room colours, you can always recover the stool or chair again in the future.

Most stools and lots of wooden chairs which have padded seats can be changed quite easily as the top is often screwed to the legs and so simply unscrewing this part will allow you easy access to where the material has been attached. If we focus here on reupholstering a simple stool, hopefully the same or very similar techniques can then be applied to chairs.

Preparation:
The first thing you are going to want to do in reupholstering a stool is to take a good look at the stool and how it’s put together. I have found that if I’m not positive, then taking a few photos of the stool from different angles including underneath can be of great benefit when you come to put it back together. You will almost certainly need certain tools too, a screwdriver to fit the heads of the screws used on the stool, a staple gun for re attaching the fabric, and also a pair of round or half round nosed pliers is very useful for removing old staples. A pair of scissors to cut your material and possibly a craft knife to trim your foam to shape will be useful as well.

Then there are your materials: Fabric to recover the stool, paint suitable for painting legs – this will vary according to whether you’re painting on wood or metal, and a primer and sandpaper will also help you to get a better finish. If the stool is older then you may well also need to replace the padding under the fabric too, so think about the depth of padding you want, a firm foam pad approx 5-10cm deep is usually a good bet – this will need to be the same size as the base of the top of the stool, and then a piece of wadding to wrap over the foam pad can be applied as well if you wish it. Personally I prefer to do this as it gives just that extra bit of comfort and luxury which makes a stool or chair feel good to sit on.

Getting to work on the painting:
Strip your stool down so that the seat and the legs are separated. Now you can strip any old paint or varnish from the legs and re-paint them in your chosen colours. Sand the wood or metal first to give you a flat keyed finish, and then paint with one or two coats of primer as needed. Now you can sand again with a fine sandpaper and then apply your chosen paint colour. You will almost certainly need at least two coats of this as well, and a light sanding in between will give a much better final finish. I have often found that painting the colour on with a brush and then using a clean sponge over it will give a much more even finished look to the paint with no brush marks. This stage will obviously take some time as you’ll need to leave the paint to dry in between coats, and as you’re going to be working on the stool afterwards, you want to let the final coat dry for a good couple of days longer than it says on the paint tin to make sure it’s fully hardened.

Reupholstering the top:
First you’ll need to strip off the old material that covers your seat pad – usually I’ve found that material has either been stapled on, or held in place with small nails either way, this is where your pliers will come in handy, and you may well need quite a firm hand to remove some of these. Don’t throw your material away at this point as you can use it to give you a good idea of the size you’ll need when you recover the stool.

Take a good look at the seat pad underneath the material and decide if you can re-use it, or if you need to replace it. Older foam may well have started to crumble or become brittle, and the pad may have become very flat or worn in which case replacing this is a good idea. Cut your foam pad to size and trim to shape on the top using scissors and craft knife you will want to trim the corners and edges to about 45 degrees so that your seat has a nice shape. Don’t panic about getting it perfect though, as that layer of wadding I mentioned earlier can be used over the top to help even out the look. When you cut your wadding, you will want to make the piece big enough that it goes right over the top, down the sides and has enough left to tuck under all round so that you can staple it into place, then you want to cut your material a little larger still.

Don’t be tempted to try and staple everything all at once. If you do one layer at a time, you will get a much more even finish to your stool, and if this is your first time doing this, perhaps try with an old piece of board, some foam off cut and a bit of scrap material as it can take a little practice to get used to stretching the fabric or wadding evenly over so that you don’t get puckers when you staple. Now lay your wadding on the floor, then your foam pad upside down, and then your base board. Carefully fold one corner in towards the centre of the base and staple it (just use one staple here for now). Then do the same with the opposite corner, then do the other two corners. Flip it over and check that it looks even, if it doesn’t remove the staple on the corner that looks too tight and try again. Once you have this looking even, you can do the sides, again start with one side, then do the side opposite rather than working round in a square, you will get a more even finish this way. When you have the wadding stapled on securely you can trim off any excess and then do the same for your material. Alternatively if you want to make your seat covers washable, cover in a plain cotton undercover at this point and then make the cover out of your chosen material by using elastic all round the edge to draw it in so that you can slip it over the top and then remove it when you want to for cleaning.

Putting it all back together:
Remember those photo’s you took at the beginning, well now’s the time you can refer to those if you need to. Take your time and re-attach the seat to the legs as they were before, screwing it down tightly and evenly. Stand back and admire your work! You’ve just revamped your first stool!
Extra ideas:
Don’t forget that you don’t have to go with a flat colour when you paint the chair or stool, you might like to use a stencil and add some decoration to the band round the top of the stool, or on the back of the chair. Maybe you’re decorating a kids playroom, in which case think outside the box a little if you can and perhaps go with different colours like a red chair with a blue seat cover, and a blue chair with a red seat cover or a different flower on each seat or something. Maybe you’re doing kitchen stools to go at a breakfast bar, so you might decide to use a material that’s wipeable. A project like this is all about creating something new that is what you want it to be, from something old and broken down looking, so have some fun with it.