I have a dining set that has chairs with upholstered seats. I hate the seats. They stay dirty all the time! I want to rip the attached fabric and padding off and just have a wooden finished seat, but here’s my question:
Is the wood under the cusion fit to be simply finished and the left uncovered?
Or is it designed to always be upholstered?
Hard to say without looking. In most modern chairs, that board is plywood made from soft woods like fir and isn’t really suitable for anything except a painted finish. To make a proper seat bottom you would want to use hardwood (hopefully the same wood as the chairs themselves). Even in many older chairs, the seat wood is basically scrap that most likely won’t be suitable for fine finishing.
Your picture makes it appear that the cushion is sitting on top of a finished chair seat. I’ve seen chairs where these cushions simply tied to the back of the chair and they could be removed easily.
I suppose I could just recover it, but with Son of Stonebow at a mere three years old, I just know I’ll have to do it again eventually. Plus, I’d rather not be out the money of reupholstering if I can just rip it off and refinish the wood underneath myself.
The underside of the seat (looking up from underneath) is a solid piece of hardwood, so I can’t even really tell how the stupid cushion is attached. Drat, I’m going to have to try and rip it up on one corner I guess.
Generally speaking, Daffy is right. OTOH, from that photo, it looks like it just might have an outside chance of being finishable wood underneath the upholstery. Are any of them loose? Maybe you can pull a bit up and see for sure. (Or post a pic of that.) If not, don’t ruin anything simply for my own curiosity. Take a pic of it from the bottom, and link us. That may help. Did you buy these new? Perhaps a previous owner had them upholstered? If they came new like this, I would consider reupholstering as opposed to trying to finish the wood.
The cushion is probably stapled and/or glued down.
However, even if it is finishable, that would still be a fair amount of work for a posssibly second rate looking piece of furniture. Getting the stain and finish to match would require some considerable time and effort and some good, qualified recommendations.
I don’t do very much in the way of furniture, tho, so take my post with a grain of salt
Then I vote for reupholstering the chairs. The wooden seat is probably not meant to be sat on, and I can’t imagine that it will cost very much to recover the chairs
Another potential problem is that, even if the seat bottom is wood, it would be perfectly flat, which isn’t very comfortable. Most plain wood dining chairs have bun-sculpted seats, for lack of a better term. How about reupholstering with something like leather, or a cleanable facsimile?
Okay, by pressing down and feeling around the edges of the cushion, I can feel another “plate” of wood resting on top of the actual chair seat. I’m going to slit the side of the cushion open and see what’s under there.
I have no idea if they came this way. They belonged to my aunt who passed the whole set on to me, and this upholstery matched her drapes and stuff in her dining room.
Pictures and more requests for help may follow. Or perhaps I’ll just need consolation and sympathy after I’ve ruined an expensive dining furniture suite. (If it can’t be refinished I’ll haul it over to the upholstery guys and pick out some new fabric, so I’m okay either way, I guess)
Okay, my mad experimentation on my chairs continues:
I slit the side of the cushion and found upholstery foam (no surprise), and then when the foam was lifted up, there was a plywood plate attached to the chair via four wood screws from the underside.
I removed the screws and the entire plate with the fabric and foam came off exposing the solid bottom of the chair which was already finished!
Now, as cher3 surmised, there is no booty sculpting to the seat, and the four screw holes are there, but the chairs aren’t uncomfortable or too low.
I have it in mind to take the cushions off all of them and use them like that with maybe some store bought tie-on cushions until the FaerieBeth/Stonebow Passle O’ Children are older and less messy. Then, I will be able to have nice things again, and have them reupholstered.
Gotta love simulposts… Forgot to add that the cushions I got at Ikea a while back are cheap enough to be considered disposable. IIRC, they were a whopping five bucks each.
Cool. Coloured putty can fill in the holes, but you would need at least a coat of finish on it after puttying so the oil colours don’t bleed onto your clothes.
What you’re planning sounds like a good idea - now they have chair cushons where the bottom has some sort of plasticky nubby nonskid coating, so they don’t move around at all. You can’t turn them over when they get dirty, but we’ve really liked them.
If you’d like to, reupholstering chairs is really, really easy - even my mom did it - and you can always do it with a plastic coating or such, if that were your desire.