What I Wish I Knew Before White Waxing and Reupholstering our Vintage Dining Chairs

We recently white waxed and reupholstered our set of eight vintage dining chairs.

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We love our vintage dining chair transformation, but, this project was the most tedious DIY project I have ever done and all I can say is I’m glad it’s done.

These chairs took us months to finish. It all started back in the fall of 2017. Jason and I were on the hunt for new dining chairs for our dining room. I knew what I wanted: french-style oval back chairs with fabric seats. The only problem was the type of chairs I wanted usually cost upwards of $200/chair.

Here’s some that are similar to ours:

We weren’t willing to spend over $1600 on our dining chairs, so we came to the conclusion that we would find some at a thrift store and redo them. I mean, how hard could it be?

See, Jason and I have always thought that we could do anything (mostly) when it comes to home renovation and DIY projects. Our confidence is pretty high 😉, so when it came to chair makeovers, we thought it would be a walk in the park. FIRST MISTAKE.

In many cases, it’s great to have confidence, but this was a project we should’ve done more research on before jumping in head first. Read on to find out the rest of the mistakes we made, in hopes, that you don’t have to make the same ones.

HERE’S WHAT I WISH I WOULD HAVE DONE BEFORE WHITE WAXING AND REUPHOLSTERING OUR VINTAGE DINING CHAIRS:

1. Account for ALL costs. Jason found our vintage chairs on Craigslist, and we thought we were swinging a pretty good deal. The set of 8 was priced at $500. That’s just $63/chair.
   
   Compared to the ones we found online that we wanted, this was almost a $150 cost savings per chair. Unfortunately, as it turned out, agreeing to the purchase price of $500 was a HUGE MISTAKE.  These chairs needed so much work, and we didn’t account for all the costs of new materials (because we didn’t know we needed them) or even our sweat equity. Of course we considered the cost of some materials but we were sure it wouldn’t be overly expensive. WRONG AGAIN. Once we ripped off the smelly blue fabric that was original to the chairs, we saw the padding underneath was basically rotted out. We were in for a huge undertaking. As we went about the project, we kept uncovering other costs that we hadn’t considered. In the end, here’s everything we needed to buy for this project:
   1. Fabric. Do you know how much fabric costs? It’s pretty expensive in my opinion, so it’s best to buy it when it is on sale. We bought our fabric at JOANN Fabrics.We actually bought a grey fabric first (pictured below), thinking that was the color we wanted to use for the chairs. We bought a lot of it and cut some out to test it on the chairs.
      
      It wasn’t exactly the look we wanted, so we took the fabric back to return it, only to find out we couldn’t return it because we had cut it.😲I just LOVE flushing money down the drain.We then bought cream/linen fabric and made sure not to cut it until we were sure that’s what we wanted to use. It ended up being perfect for the chairs, though we had yet another fabric-related issue. We didn’t have enough. There wasn’t much of our chosen fabric left in the store, so we bought it all thinking there would be just enough.  NOPE. Turns out we didn’t have enough. We had to go back to JOANN’s again. Did I mention that the closest JOANN’s is 40 minutes from house? Anyway, someone was looking out for me because they had more of the fabric we needed in their warehouse – it ended up being just enough to finish the chairs. Hallelujah.So let’s recap on all the lessons learned from buying fabric: 1. Make sure you measure exactly how much fabric you need for your project and buy it all at once, as they may not have anymore of it. 2. It’s best to find the fabric you want the first time around. If you take it back, make sure you don’t cut it. 3. Be nice to the fabric people (and everyone else, for that matter). If you’re anything like me, they’ll end up knowing you by first name at the end of this project.
   2. Padding. We hadn’t thought we were going to need to buy chair pads, but turns out the original padding was just as horrific as the exterior stinky blue fabric. Cue applause.We didn’t know which padding to buy for the seats and backs of the chairs so we bought an array of different foams to test them out. We also bought batting to place over the chair cushions to make them comfier. This took several trips to and from JOANN’s because we tested out the foam types, had returns to make, had more to buy etc.
   3. Staple gun. Originally I thought we would use a manual stapler to staple the fabric. Turns out I was wrong…see a trend here? We had to buy an electric staple gun because there wasn’t enough pressure for a regular one for our chairs. The staples just weren’t holding. We went to all the nearby places that I thought would have an electric staple gun, but turns out nobody had one in store. We ended up having to order one online. It didn’t cost much, but it was not something we planned for at all.
   4. Sewing machine. Not all reupholstery projects require a sewing machine. I certainly wasn’t planning on sewing anything. My sewing skills are about that of a two year olds, so this wasn’t even on my radar.It ended up that I had to use one to sew fabric edges for the chair seats. See, we made a mistake (are you surprised?). After we attached the fabric, we realized we couldn’t use reupholstery tacks because they wouldn’t cover the staples. We didn’t staple the chairs in a low enough spot the whole way around for the tacks to completely cover the eyesore of the staples. We needed some type of edging that would have some generous coverage to it. There are fabric-type edges you can glue on, but I wanted a different look. I looked for ways to attach the fabric edging that I did liked, and that’s when I realized I needed something called piping. Not only that, but I needed to have sewn the fabric onto the piping and then sewn it in the edges of the fabric before stapling them down. We certainly weren’t going to rip off the new fabric we had just spent weeks attaching.So I looked up other options. I found something called double welt piping. It was perfect, except that I had to learn how to actually do it.We were fortunate that my grandparents had a sewing machine to loan to me. If not for that, I’m not sure what we would have done. Sewing machines are expensive, and I would not have wanted to buy one just for this project. Since I haven’t sewn since middle school, I had to watch several sewing tutorials for how to use my particular sewing machine and also for how to do the actual double welt piping. It wasn’t overly complicated once I got the hang of it, but it took me quite awhile to sew all the piping for all eight chairs.
   5. Hot glue gun. Finally, something I already owned. We used a hot glue gun to attach the fabric piping to the chairs.
   6. Upholstery tacks. We tried to use the piping on the backs of the chairs, too. The double piping was too big for the backs so we ended up using tacks. We were going to use the original tacks, but they were so old and we had bent many of them taking them out. We ended up purchasing new ones. We went back to JOANN’s yet again to buy them, but ended up having to place an order from their store because they didn’t have nearly enough on the shelves. Once we finally got them, Jason hammered them in one by one. This took just about forever. Poor guy. He spent several hours for several nights hammering them in. I know he wanted to throw the chairs through the window by this point, so I’m very proud of him for finishing the job.
   7. White wax. This was actually the first purchase we made because we wanted to redo the wood before we conquered the fabric. When we first bought the chairs, we weren’t quite sure what we were going to do with the wood. We could either have kept it the way it was, painted it, sanded and stained it, or do some type of other finish. I found an image on Pinterest of someone using white wax and I LOVED the look of it. I ended up buying Miss Mustard Seed’s white wax from a local store and had it shipped to me. This was my first time ever using white wax and I made a huge mistake. I should have tested it out first, which you’ll read about in #3 below.
      
2. Consider the chair configuration. One reason our confidence was so high early on was because we had reupholstered before. But the furniture we reupholstered before was so different.If you’re reupholstering a square seat cushion on a chair, for example, it will probably be very easy because all you’ll need to do is pull the fabric around the current seat cushion and then staple it underneath..and done! That’s what we had done in the past, so again, we thought this project couldn’t be THAT much harder. Boy, were we wrong.The chairs we purchased had curves and angles and were in no way easy to reupholster. Not only that, but after we stapled the fabric onto the chair seats we needed something to cover the staples. Our staples did not go under the seat, which meant that we needed some type of trim work, as I mentioned earlier. The same went for the seat backs. There were staples showing and we needed something to cover them. We hadn’t quite thought out the ins and outs of the project, which were heavily based on the chair configurations.If you’re looking to do a similar project, make sure to note how the chair will be put back together based on its structure.
3. Test out white wax on something else first. Once we decided that we wanted to use white wax on the wood parts of the chairs, I ordered the wax and immediately got to work when it came in. MISTAKE! The thing was – I hadn’t ever used white wax before. I have painted, stained, sanded, and caulked wood but never had I white waxed anything. Although I read and followed the directions on the back of the white wax box, I had no idea how it was supposed to look when I applied it. Did I apply enough wax? Did I apply too much wax? Should I use a brush or a cloth? Was this how it was supposed to look when wet? If only I had done a little practicing first I wouldn’t have made this huge mistake.
   
4. Make a solid plan for every part of the chair makeover. When we first saw the chairs, we really liked the look of them and we knew they needed some TLC. But, we weren’t positive exactly how we were going to make them over. This ended up hurting us in the long run because we had to buy more items than we thought and had to put in so much more effort than we anticipated. I had to sew, for goodness sakes! If I could redo this project, I would have started out by finding an image of a chair that I wanted to replicate and gone off that. Then, I would have determined every single task that I needed to do and which supplies were required for that task. Then, I would have looked up tutorials for each task just to be sure I was prepared.
5. Consider the types of edging. If we would have done research into the types of edging and piping available, we may have rethought about undertaking such a project. Sewing the piping and hammering in the tacks took so much time that I still wonder if this project was worth it.

I know I’ve complained about pretty much every part of our vintage dining chair project, but I like to give my readers my honest opinion. I never actually added up all our purchases for material because I’m scared to know how much we actually spent. The whole point of this project was to save money, but I’m not really sure if we accomplished our goal. Plus, it ended up being more of a headache than anything else.

Am I happy with the chairs now? YES, of course I am. I love how they turned out. They are gorgeous, especially sitting around my Restoration Hardware table. But, if I could do it over again, I probably wouldn’t. I would buy new chairs outright. We got a little in over our heads on this project.

Having said all that, I have so much respect for upholsterers. I mean, their job is tough and they have some amazing skills to do what they do. 👏

After searching the internet to find a chair that MOST resembles ours, this is my pick:

Seeing that the chair above is $330, it does make me feel a little better about our DIY project. The chair is so similar in a lot of ways including the style, the fabric, and the wood tone. If we were to have bought these, all eight would have cost $2,640. I’m sure we did not spend nearly that for ours, so I’m going to try and give myself a teeny tiny pat on the back…even though I would never do this project again! 🙂

By the way, I hope I wasn’t too harsh and I hope I don’t deter you from completing a DIY project. I just want to be completely upfront with you about my experience!

Here’s a before and after shot:

Here’s how the chairs look in my dining room!