Turn Upholstered Dining Chair Seats Into Wood

I have been so excited to show you my chairs! Look at these nasty seat covers before, to give you an idea of how old they were, horse hair was used for the padding. I thought I would share how to turn upholstered dining chair seats into wood!

Turn upholstered dining chair seats into wood

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!

What you will need:

Cardboard and protractor-to make a pattern

Pine sheet or whatever wood you are using for the seats

Tape Measure

Table Saw

Sander

Stain (I used Dark Walnut)

screws to attached the seats to your chair

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!