Test Dining Room Chair

Our dining room chairs are falling apart. They’ve lived a good life for the price we paid at garage sales. When I tried to repair a few with extra screws, the wood just split and the chairs became scrap wood.

So I’ve decided to build a new set of dining room chairs. It won’t be fast, by the time you take into account our trip to Europe and all the weddings this summer, I won’t have many free weekends. My goal is to get the frames build, sanded and stained by end of summer, leaving me the fall/winter to upholster (which I can do inside).

I’ve been working on a design and decided to build a tester chair to see how it feels to sit on. The back rails are curves and the front legs have a slight angle to them.

Using 2x4’s, 2x6’s and scrap 1” pine, I build the frame of the chairs. The hardest part was cutting the curve with the jigsaw.

From there I used leftover webbing to create the seat and back. I did not have enough to do 3 strips in each direction, so I did 2 instead. I JUST had enough and wasn’t really able to pull it tight with the stretcher.

From there I put on a layer of 1” foam, 2 layers of batting and then the fabric. It feels a little thin, but I think that is in large part to my using the cheap softer foam. For the real chairs, I plan to use the denser stuff.

And now we know: there are definitely flaws with this design:

1) The seat is too deep, the foam took up less space than expected

2) Around the perimeter the foam falls through the frame where there is no webbing, there should be another layer between the webbing and foam

3) It’s too low, again the foam took up less space

4) I’m not sure I like the design of the back rail, that curve…