Reupholstering a Chair

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, or so the saying goes.  Just take a look at this broken chair that Shae found for free.

This solid wood chair was missing its seat and on closer inspection carried the stamp of “Pennsylvania House”.  After some digging around the internet, I found out that Pennsylvania House was a furniture company that specialized in mass market reproduction of Colonial style furniture.  The company was bought up by LADD Furniture and turned into the mid to high end brand.

Enough history, let’s repair a chair.

The first step is to cut out a new blank.  I measured the chair and left a half an inch on each side.  Then I transferred those measurements to a sheet of 3/4″ birch plywood (leftover from our washer/dryer platform).

I gave it a quick test fit to see how it looked.

That’ll work!  The next step was to stain the bottom of the blank so it matched the chair.  I had some leftover walnut stain from our dry erase board project.

After two coats of stain, it was a pretty close match.

I only needed to stain one side because we were going to upholster the chair seat.  After gathering some craft supplies we set to work.

The first step was to transfer the seat blank measurements to some high density foam.  We added a 3/4″ margin give or take.

We also cut out three layers of polyfill.

Then Shae carefully measured the fabric and we cut that to size.

Here are all of the parts stacked together.  At this point, it is upside down.

After carefully lining up the center of the fabric to the center of the plywood, we used a heavy duty hand staple gun to hold the fabric in place.

We did the front and back center’s first because the fabric is striped and we didn’t want wavy stripes.

Working our way out from the centers, we added a lot more staples.

The corners are a bit tricky.

Voila, a “new” chair!

Shae told me I had to be in some of these blog posts.  I think she is trying to prevent history from repeating itself where her mother is in none of the family pictures (because she was the one taking the pictures).

Here is the more attractive chair model.

Finally, here is a before and after composite.