Easy DIY Upholstery

I'm pretty proud of the way this turned out, so I'm sharing it.

Right after we moved to Louisville, we bought a table and chairs for $40 at a yard sale. The table needs to be sanded and re-finished, but it's sturdy and has 2 leaves you can put in and with a tablecloth on it, no one knows it technically still needs some work. Anyway, I've been wanting to jazz up the chairs for a while. Not that there was anything wrong with them, I just wanted to add some color to the room.

the original chair. not bad.

 So, I bought some cool fabric. I meant to purchase laminated cotton, because I thought it would be best to wipe up spills and keep clean. And in fact, I thought that's what I bought until it came in the mail. I guess I must have gotten distracted while looking at all the great prints, because what I had purchased was more of a sturdy, textured cotton (but not laminated). Anyway, I adore the print and think I'll shop around to see if there's some sort of finishing spray I can put on it. In case you are in the market ever, I got it from fabric.com for about $7.

cute, right?

The project itself was easy and only took me a couple of hours. I roughly measured the amount of fabric needed to cover each seat, and cut out the fabric. I unscrewed the seats on all four chairs, considered ripping out the current upholstery (but decided not to waste the time), and just wrapped each seat up like a little present with the fabric and hot glued it to the bottom of the seat. The tutorial I had read suggested using a staple gun, but I didn't have one and I figured hot glue would work just as well. So easy. The hardest part was screwing the seats back on to the chairs. I guess these chairs were probably made by hand at one point, and the screw holes didn't seem to line up quite right unless you paired the seat with the exact chair it came from. So that part took some trial and error. But overall, an easy project, and . . . voila! Here's what the new dining room chairs look like! I'm super happy.