Turn Upholstered Dining Chair Seats Into Wood!

9 Materials
Look at these nasty seat covers before, to give you an idea of how old they were, horse hair was used for the padding.
Originally I was going to make a patterned from these and upholster the seats again. I was a little worried about upholstered chairs as I do have 3 young children but I couldn't think of a better idea .... until my husband suggested making wood tops instead. Brilliant right??!! The only problem was I had never done that before.....until now!
First I stripped the chairs all the way down and painted them in a custom mixed cream color.
Next I cut out wood to be the base for the new tops
Then it got a little tricky, I had to make a template for my seats.


To get the back curve right I used a protractor, it worked like a charm. I wanted my seat tops to hang over roughly a 1/2 inch.
Once we had the template cut out we traced them on to our sheet pine. You can buy sheets of pine like this from Lowes. (notice Dave's finger, he sliced it open with a table saw so use caution on this next step)
Once everything was all traced we used a jigsaw to cut out the curved back and then ran the straight edges through the table saw.
And this is what you get!
To stain my chairs I first used Miniwaxes Dark Walnut, once that stain had dried I applied Miniwaxes Cherry stain over the top to warm it up just a bit!
Brooke @ Start at Home
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  • Abla Abla on Sep 21, 2019

    How to add more cushion to my dining room chairs?

  • Kathryn Kathryn on Sep 22, 2019

    hi I was wondering if you could something like that with chairs that were cane on the seat? Or if anyone know how to make a bench out of 3 chairs

  • Roberto Roberto on Feb 05, 2020

    Why not to show the stain process in detail? thats the most interesting part my friend, at least for me; so far you did a great job!

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  • Nancy Nesbitt Nancy Nesbitt on Sep 15, 2020

    You did a great job! Love the color of the paint and stain together.

  • Clydis Young Clydis Young on Sep 10, 2023

    I found some chairs with no seats I’m going to try your idea and make seats for my chairs .

    Thanks for your demonstration.

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