Beautiful Chairs - A Seriously Cheap Restoration

Picture the scene: you are driving with your friend through some local streets. Its council pickup time, your hands are shaking, eyes wide, head swivelling looking for only the best garbage. You spot possibility. Tires screech and you jump out ready to investigate. You quickly identify a pair of chairs with the grossest (both looks and just grime) upholstery you've ever seen and one of them has a broken backrest. Would you quickly stuff them in the back of your Honda Jazz?

One of the chairs in question with absolutely filthy upholstery

So this project was to refurbish and reuse these chairs, I loved the shape of them and the one that you could sit on was surprisingly comfortable for such a un-shapely chair. There were only two big tasks to undertake which was to reupholster both chairs and to repair the one broken back. The timber itself although dirty and a little tired was honestly not worth bothering to strip and re finish, a good cleaning did them very nicely.

So I spent a couple hours painstakingly removing and disposing of the old material whilst making sure to keep the foam as it still had life in it and then wandered to my local fantastic recycling maker shop, Reverse Garbage to find a new fabric. After deliberation (and a talking down from friends as I was about to buy a lime green thinking it might be decadent) I decided on a mature and durable navy upholstery fabric that was exactly the amount I needed.

Only $7AUD for exactly what I wanted!

Now that I had the fabric and had the back of the broken chair exposed I could investigate how it had broken. Now disappointingly I found that what I had assumed would be timber (much easier to repair or replace) was in fact plastic.

The crack right in the middle of the chair back

Now this revelation had me considering to abandon the broken chair as I was unsure how I would be able to fix it and because the back is quite a specifically curved part I was not confident in my ability to make something strong enough from timber. Although this near abandonment delayed the build and felt like hitting a wall it actually gave me to confidence to try a really stupid solution as if it would be waste if I gave up anyway may as well try just encase.

I used some mending plates I had lying around

I made sure it put these on the back so there was no way they'd be felt when you sit on it. Although I was very sceptical initially, this chair has now been used for four months with no problem. Once they were reupholstered I actually can no longer remember or tell which one had the repair which I would say was an absolute win!

Nearly finished upholsery

I can not recommend upholstery enough. Its such a surprising cheap way to get more out of furniture and all it requires is a good staple gun, fabric and scissors. Just breathes so much life into tired pieces for a fun couple of ours and fills them with a bit of you. Now they are your chairs that you fixed.

You can seen the wear on the timber but it just wasn't worth the time to re finish

I won't pretend this is the best or even my best upholstery job but they look great in person and more importantly are fantastic to sit on. It was more important to me to simply get this project done than it was to make it perfect, I could always go back and put more time into this project later.

All up this project was only around a handful of hours of work and about $15 for fabric, hardware and consumables. They are super useful in my space our longue room and since they are exceptionally comfortable they can be used as extra dinning chairs when we have extra people over for board games. I am deeply proud of this project and saving these chairs from going straight to landfill.