Ikea Hack Kitchen Chairs

Ikea Hack Hickory Kitchen Chair Seats

So we got a little ahead of ourselves. Let me explain how….

It all started when we were going through what we call our “hickory phase”. We were obsessed with hickory and the way the grain looked and the overall color and look it gave when paired with metal features (hence our other blog post about our hickory and metal nightstands). Probably the main thing we wanted to build out of hickory, though, was a kitchen table with some square, somewhat modern, metal legs for all of our family to sit at during Christmas.

We had a super small, cheap kitchen table prior to this that came with 4 matching chairs. It served its purpose for a couple years, but we were ready for something bigger – so we built our hickory table and even welded our own legs!!

This is what our hickory kitchen table with the metal legs looks like.

As you can see in the picture, it looked AWESOME, but now we were stuck with 4 cheap chairs that didn’t match the table….and we definitely didn’t consider that we didn’t have the time to build ourselves matching chairs.

So what would any woodworking millennials do to solve this problem?! An IKEA hack of course. An IKEA hickory hack. Instead of building all new chairs (since the backs and legs were already black to match the table legs) we decided to just build new chair seats.

We started by unscrewing the cheap chair seats from the legs and setting them aside. We then glued up 4 panels of hickory that were all slightly larger than the existing chair seats.

These are the hickory panels that we glued up for the Ikea Hack Chair Seats.

Once they were completely dry, we traced the outline of the old chair seats on top of them all and cut them out on the band saw. We smoothed the edges out on our belt sander and then put a slight chamfer on the edges so that they wouldn’t feel sharp on peoples’ legs.

These are the hickory panels after we cut the seat shapes.

After sanding, we used the router to round over the edges.

After a bit of sanding and several coats of General Finishes Arm-R-Seal in Semi-Gloss, we were ready to attach them. We saved the screws that came with the chairs and attached them in the same exact areas as the old seats were attached to.

All of the Ikea Hack Chair Seats had a nice satin finish to them.

We also ended up building a bench with black steel legs also – and the final setup looked so good! This little DIY Ikea Hack ended up saving us around $800 because we didn’t have to buy matching, solid hickory kitchen chairs. Also, it’s so great to be able to build a custom piece that matches better than anything you could find online!! We’re all about making sales and closing deals with clients, but sometimes it is nice to just sit back, make yourself something you want, and save a few hundred bucks! Especially when you back yourself into a corner by making a huge kitchen table with no matching chairs…..

This is Part 1 of our Ikea Hack Kitchen Chair video that we made documenting the process!

Anndddd here’s part 2 of the build! We focus on sanding and finishing. And of course you get to see the final product….plus a few cute pets.

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This post may contain affiliate links for products we used to create this project! If you’d like to check them out, we do get a small percentage of the sale and they are of no extra cost to you! It all goes towards supporting the content creation of Jennie and Davis. BUT – we do not take tool sponsorships and there were no tool endorsements. Just our honest opinions!