Today I will show you in photos how I replaced the seat upholstery on my office chair at home. The chair itself is very comfortable, but because summers are very hot and the chair is leather, it regularly became damp with sweat. If I had treated the surface of the office chair with leather dye or wax even occasionally, there would have been no problems. Instead, the leather simply rotted. Interestingly, the foam was in much better condition and proved more resistant both to the harsh conditions and to wear, which surprised me.
!!! This is NOT A MASTERCLASS in how a chair should be repaired, but an account of what I did so I would not have to sit on ruined upholstery. The appearance of the chair also helped motivate me to get to work. To replace the upholstery, I used a piece of second-hand leather, probably from a coat. I cleaned the leather first, dyed it black with leather dye, and rubbed it with the wax supplied with the dye for shine and protection.
The tools I used:
- A cordless screwdriver; an ordinary screwdriver would also do
- A fine shoemaker's hook
- A saw
- An axe
- A mortise chisel; a woodworking chisel would also do, or, as a last resort, a knife and an axe
- A hammer
- A knife
- A staple gun
The materials I used:
- Leather: I did not buy any; I had some used leather at home
- 2 pieces of foam that I already had
- Ordinary black self-tapping screws
- Staples for the staple gun
- Black nylon thread that I already had
Here is a photo of the state I let my chair get into. Naturally, it was my fault, and I am not making excuses. My advice for the future is either to choose something other than leather for a chair, such as mesh, or to buy good-quality leather and regularly care for the office chair's upholstery. The photo shows that I have started removing the armrests:
I removed the office chair from its base:
I am pulling out the staples securing the upholstery underneath the chair:
Here we can see the chair padding, made of foam:
We remove the damaged upholstery and foam, leaving the bare plywood:
What I wanted to change about the chair was its shape: it was designed more for relaxing, whereas I work in it. I decided to make the padding flat, without a hollow, and firmer by using slightly thinner foam. But reducing the foam thickness would make the seat thin and rather unattractive, so I decided to increase the seat's thickness a little by screwing on several wooden battens and placing plywood over them:
At the armrest mounting points, I cut recesses in the battens with a chisel:
Using the cordless screwdriver, I screw the prepared battens onto the seat from underneath:
We measure out the plywood for the office chair seat:
We saw the plywood along the mark:
We check the plywood against the seat:
We fasten the plywood to the battens on the seat with self-tapping screws:
We can see how the foam creates the hollow:
We remove the layers of foam that formed the hollow, since I wanted a flatter and slightly firmer seat:
We staple the foam to the seat. In a few places I use glue. I only had PVA glue available, so I had to wait for it to dry where the pieces of foam joined:
\ We sew the new upholstery to the leather on the inside of the office chair backrest with an ordinary fine shoemaker's hook:
After sewing it on, I found a small defect in the leather. It is not very clear here, but the leather was slightly indented along a fold. It might have lasted quite a long time even with that defect, but since I had already started the job, I decided to cover it with a patch:
Here is the patch I cut out and coated with Moment glue:
I glued on the patch and waited about 20 minutes, then carefully sewed it on with the same fine shoemaker's hook:
What I did not like was the join between the leather and the sides of the chair, which are made of imitation leather rather than real leather. I sewed everything together with the hook. It may not look very elegant, but I am not a furniture maker, and this was my first time reupholstering a chair:
The process of sewing the upholstery onto the chair can also be seen from the back:
After that, I stretched the leather firmly and stapled it to the underside of the plywood:
I also wanted to add buttons to the seat for decoration, and found 4 blue plastic buttons:
I cut 4 circles out of the leather, threaded nylon thread around their edges, and pulled the leather tight around each button:
I ended up with 4 buttons like these:
I fitted only 2 buttons, passing their threads through the existing holes in the chair and pulling them tight. After that, I stapled on a thin black fabric to conceal the plywood and the points where the leather is fastened to it:
This is how my office chair looked after my DIY repair:
We attach the wheeled base to the chair, and can sit down and enjoy the work we have done:
Today I have shared how I repaired an office chair. After using it, I found a few things I was unhappy with. I will publish how I modified the chair a little later.
This was Sergey Lazarenko.
Thank you for your attention.
Let us take a short break and watch a short video showing how to make arrowheads and dart tips from the ceramic of high-voltage insulators:
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