Dining Room Chairs that Don’t Break When You Sit in Them

It seems like a basic requirement for dining chairs: they should not break when you sit down in them. However, my dining chairs were not meeting even this baseline need.

I bought them on craigslist about a year and a half ago when I was trying to finish up the sunroom/dining room/kitchen renovation, and I picked them because they were inexpensive and low profile. I wasn’t ready to commit to more expensive chairs (and man, dining room chairs can really cost a pretty penny!), and I didn’t want anything with a high back since I thought that would look wrong in the space. Also I needed 5 chairs which is a hard number to come by, and so when I found some old captains chairs for $50 TOTAL I decided to go for it. I thought maybe I’d paint them and assumed I’d eventually replace them, but for $10 each it seemed worth the temporary measure.

I really did like them, but all of them had a few loose pieces that I just couldn’t fix. I tried gluing and clamping them multiple times, but they would always loosen up again such that when we had company over people would notice parts coming off and I thought tragedy was probably not far off.

For Sam’s birthday this spring we planned a dinner party about a month in advance, and I decided that I would have new not-dangerous chairs before then. What a concept!

However, I still wasn’t willing to pay an arm and a leg — I like chairs (not as much as Naomi does), but we just spent a good chunk of change on our basement floor update and we couldn’t splurge on chairs at the same time. I did a lot of searching in some affordable places like Target and Amazon. The strongest contender for awhile was this set of chairs from Amazon:

There were a few color options that I thought could work in my space, but ultimately I a) didn’t love the boxy silhouette, and b) could only get a set of 4 which left the big open question about what the heck I would put at the end of the table. I couldn’t figure out an affordable head chair option that coordinated but didn’t look like it was trying to be identical, and so I just sat on the whole thing for awhile.

A couple of weeks passed, and then I realized I needed to make a decision or I wouldn’t have something before Sam’s party. That would be a terrible reason to buy something I didn’t like, but sometimes when you’re slowly decorating a house it’s good to have some motivational deadlines.

I decided to check Target again, and that’s when I came across these chairs that I must have missed in my initial searches:

Okay yes they’re a tad on the derivative mid-century end of the spectrum, but I *like* mid-century, I liked the color (it would tie into our blue cabinets but not be too dark like some navy chairs I’d found), and they were on sale for $80/pair. I knew I’d need to buy three pairs and would have one chair left over, but even if you think of it as $240 for 5 chairs that’s still a pretty good deal. Sam said he “didn’t love them” but was fine with them as long as they were comfortable and *I* liked them plenty, so I decided to go for it.

Once they arrived they were super easy to assemble (just attaching the leg base to the chair body with four screws). I really like them, and we got enough compliments on them from our friends that I think Sam has been won over as well.

Sorry it’s hard to tell the true color in some of these photos — it’s ridiculous to complain about, but our sunroom gets so much light that it’s sometimes hard to photograph it without it getting too blown out. The top photo shows the color most accurately: a medium blue.

Murphy loves to sleep in them, so I’m glad that I got something light enough that the cat hair isn’t horrendously obvious (which I definitely thought about when I picked them). Here he is inspecting them for the first time, since I know you love cat photos:

And that’s the tale of how we finally ended up with chairs that don’t break when you sit in them. Hurrah!