Updating My Dining Room Chairs

Updating my dining room chairs was the right solution since they were still in good condition.

Since we are holding up in our house more right nowbecause of COVID, I decided to finish an ongoing project. I have been updating my dining room tables and chairs.

I am happy to say that I am done! It has been a long project.

It all started because our tables and chairs were bar height and the wrong wood tone. We found that the tall height was hard on some of our backs and this height was a less formal look than what I was looking for.

The first thing we did was to cut our table legs down and the chair legs down. As you can see from this picture, the cross bar ended up to be pretty low to the floor but we were willing to live with that. It was far easier (we thought) to refinish the chairs and to use what we had rather than buying a new table and chairs.

I have a large buffet piece that we love has moved along with us from home to home. It has found a home in 5 houses including a trip across the country from Virginia to Minnesota. It was important to me that the dining room table and chairs coordinate with this piece. The table and chairs were blonde wood which didn’t compliment the buffet or our walnut floors. The buffet is a painted piece with a distressed finish.

My table and chairs, on the other hand, were not very expensive but they serve us well. We love their versalit! Depending on how we arrange them, we can accomodate groups of all different sizes. We have two 5′ square tables that allow us to sit up to 16 people when set apart. Each has a leaf that can change the table size to seat either 6 or 8 people. When we put them together we can seat 12 all around one large table. We rearrange them depending on the number of people we are hosting.

So, I decided to first refinish and update the table first. I don’t have any pictures of this process but it is pretty much what I did on the chairs. I primed and painted the table legs and apron the same color as the buffet. Then proceeded to distress them by hammering small indentations with a tip of a nail and sanding them a bit. I finished with a glaze.

I then sanded and stained the tabletop to compliment the walnut floors. In the picture on the left of my son’s birthday, you can see when the table top was blonde compared to the picture on the right after I stained it a darker color to compliment the floors in our new house.

I spent several days priming and painting the chairs.

Thankfully, I had a hand-held sprayer that I bought for a client project. Each was lightly sanded and then primed and painted.

The painted chairs looked great but they looked too new when compared to the distressed finish on the buffet and newly refinished table. Each chair needed to be glazed to create a more antique look.

I was able to achieve this by wiping a glaze on each and then wiping it back off with a damp cloth leaving a small residue in grain lines.

Lastly, each chair seat needed to be recovered. The pads that came with the chairs were not very comfortable. They were not very dense and not very thick. The fabric was very stained as well from many years of use.

I took this opportunity to take apart the covers and replace the pads with a more dense and thick foam to help cushion. To do this, I needed to remove all the staples from the cover fabric so I could get at the padding. First there were approximately 20 staples on the facing fabric and then over a hundred staples holding the fabric on each cushion!