Turn Upholstered Dining Chair Seats Into Wood!

First I want to say thank you for all your kind words.  I am grateful for all the comments of support and sympathy.  I was a little hesitant to post about my struggles with my 3 kiddos as I didn't want to come across whiny or ungrateful.  I do love my kids, they are a huge blessing in ours lives.....but....somedays are just a little more {or A LOT} more trying than others.  

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  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.  

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!

I have loved having wood tops, they clean up so nicely!

TTFN

Brooke