There is a wingback in half the living rooms of Central PA that has reached the awkward stage: too comfortable to toss, too shabby for company. If you have ever wondered what actually happens between dropping a chair at our shop and picking up something that looks new, here is the whole trip, bench by bench, with an honest DIY verdict at each stop.
One note before we start. This is about fully upholstered chairs: wingbacks, club chairs, slipper chairs, overstuffed rockers and recliners. A dining chair with a drop-in seat is a much simpler animal, and we covered that project separately in how to completely recover a dining chair.
Tools for the home attempt
If you are going to try any part of this yourself, gather the tools before the chair is in pieces on the garage floor:
- A staple lifter or tack puller and side-cutting pliers. A flat screwdriver will chew up the frame.
- A pneumatic or electric stapler. Hand staplers leave staples standing proud in hardwood, and your hand gives out by the second panel.
- A webbing stretcher if the seat has webbing. Pulling jute tight by hand does not work.
- Curved upholstery needles, heavy thread, and a regulator or long skewer for moving stuffing under the cover.
- A serrated bread knife or electric carving knife for foam, plus spray adhesive.
- Fabric shears, a tape measure, tailor’s chalk, and a camera. The camera matters most.
Strip-down: where the surprises live
An upholstered chair comes apart in the reverse order it was built. Dust cover first, then outside back, outside arms, and inward layer by layer. On a wingback that means pulling somewhere north of a thousand staples or tacks, one at a time, without chewing up the frame underneath.
This is also where the chair tells its history. We find scorch marks, coins from decades back, previous repairs done with whatever was in the garage, and occasionally evidence that mice spent a winter inside. Every surprise gets photographed and priced before we go further, so you are never billed for a mystery.
How we read the old layers
The order of what comes off tells us when the chair was built and who has been inside it since. Tacks instead of staples, horsehair instead of foam, and cotton felt over a hand-stitched edge roll mean a chair built before the war and a frame worth being careful with. Two generations of staple holes along a rail mean someone has recovered it already, and we look harder at the padding they left behind. We also read the wear: foam gone orange and crumbly has reached the end of its life, burlap torn over a spring shows where a coil has been punching through, and a seat compressed on one side tells us which end the family dog claimed.
DIY verdict: yes, and it is the single best way to learn how upholstery actually works. Photograph every layer as it comes off and keep every old panel. Those rags become your pattern later.
The frame check
With the padding exposed, we rack the frame gently and listen. Joints loosen after decades of use, and covering a wobbly frame with new fabric is like painting over rot. Loose joints get taken apart, cleaned of old glue, reglued and clamped overnight. Cracked rails get repaired or replaced with matching hardwood.
Sometimes the frame is fine and a hidden panel is the problem. On a mid-century La-Z-Boy from Lebanon that came through the shop recently, the frame was tight and the steel mechanism worked perfectly, but the curved plywood panels inside the arms had worn through. We cut new panels to the original profile rather than stacking fresh padding on a broken one, because on a recliner the arms are where you push off to stand up.
DIY verdict: regluing a joint that is already apart is fair game. Injecting glue into a closed, dirty joint is not a repair, it just glues the dirt. And if the chair is an antique, stop here, because old pieces from Lancaster County auctions often hide fragile joinery that deserves a careful hand.
Springs, webbing and the deck
Under the seat, older chairs carry coil springs tied eight ways by hand to jute webbing. Newer chairs run sinuous steel springs front to back. Either way, this layer decides how the chair sits, and it is usually the real reason a seat feels tired.
We replace stretched webbing, then retie or re-clip the springs to the correct height and tension. A round slipper chair from Lititz shows why. When the cover came off, the seat was a ring of coil springs leaning into each other, because the twine holding them upright had rotted away. The springs themselves were fine. Each one was stood back up and lashed to the frame and to its neighbors until the whole ring compressed as one even surface. Nobody had noticed the sag, because the skirt hid it until the hem started puddling on the floor.
Get this layer wrong and the finest fabric in Pennsylvania will not save the chair.
DIY verdict: this is where we honestly wave most people off. Hand-tying springs is a skill built over dozens of seats, and a bad tie job fails within months.
Padding, from the burlap up
New burlap goes over the springs, then an edge roll to keep the front of the seat crisp. Padding follows in layers: high-density foam cut and shaped for the seat and back, polyester batting to smooth the transitions, and a muslin sub-cover on finer work.
Foam choice matters more than fabric choice for how the chair will live. A firm high-resilience seat foam over a softer back foam is the usual recipe, but we adjust it for the person. A reading chair for a tall farmer gets a different build than a sewing chair for a small grandmother.
DIY verdict: replacing the foam core in a loose seat cushion is very doable. Shaping attached padding over wings and arms takes practice to avoid lumps that telegraph through the new cover.
Choosing fabric, and how much of it
Here is the part people want to start with, and the part we save until the chair is stripped. Three things matter: weight, wear rating and pattern. Upholstery fabric should feel heavier than anything you would sew a shirt from. The wear rating is printed on the sample tag as double rubs, and for an everyday armchair we like thirty thousand or more.
Pattern is where the budget quietly grows. A solid or a small texture is cut with almost no waste. A large floral or a wide stripe has to be centered on the inside back, matched down the seat cushion and carried across the skirt, and that can add a couple of yards. Velvet and corduroy add another rule: every panel is cut with the nap running the same direction, or the chair looks like two dye lots.
In plain words, a typical wingback swallows around seven yards of 54-inch fabric. A club chair takes a little less, a skirted recliner a little more. Patterned fabric, add a yard or two, and always buy a spare half yard, because the day you need it the mill will have discontinued the color.
Our showroom in Myerstown keeps a library of sample books, from heavy tweeds and velvets to marine-grade vinyls and top-grain leathers. The Lebanon recliner left in a heathered gray-green tweed for a practical reason: recliners wear at the arm tops, the seat front and the headrest, and a flat solid shows every spot within a year.
Pattern, cut, sew, fit
Those old panels we saved at strip-down now earn their keep. Each one gets squared up and used to pattern the new fabric, with seam allowances and stretch direction marked.
The round Lititz chair shows why patterning matters. Its new cover was a light blue stripe made of columns of small dots. On a square chair a stripe runs top to bottom and behaves. On a round seat there is no top or bottom, so the stripes were run front to back across the circle and stood upright around the boxing, meeting themselves at the back seam on a dot. Five buttons on a back no wider than a pillow then had to pull through without bending a single column.
Then the sewing: welt cord, curved wing seams and cushion boxing all run through our walking-foot Consew machines with bonded polyester thread. A walking foot feeds the top and bottom layers together, so heavy layered seams come out flat instead of puckered. A home machine drags the top layer, and the welt wanders.
Fitting is the slow, satisfying end. Panels go on, get pinned, adjusted and stapled in sequence, and the last seams close by hand with a curved needle and a blind stitch. A fresh dust cover goes on the bottom, and the chair is done.
DIY verdict: a patient sewer can manage straight seams and even decent welt. Pattern matching on a striped or floral chair, and buttons through a tufted back, are the stages that break most home projects.
When to call a pro
Our honest scorecard: strip-down and simple regluing are fine home territory. Springs, attached padding, tufting and final fitting are where experience pays for itself. If the chair is an antique or carries family history, have it assessed before anyone pulls a tack, since original details can matter more than you think. That careful end of the trade is our antique restoration service, while everyday pieces go through our regular furniture upholstery bench. Call 717-383-6917, describe your chair, and we will tell you which route fits.
FAQ
How long does it take to reupholster an armchair?
The hands-on work spans several days across the different benches, and the calendar time depends on fabric arrival and the shop queue. We give you a real timeline when we quote the job, and we stick to it.
How much fabric do I need for a wingback chair?
Plan on roughly seven yards of 54-inch fabric for a typical wingback, and more for large patterns that need matching. Send us photos and measurements before you order and we will confirm the yardage so you do not overbuy.
Can I put new fabric over the old fabric?
You can, and it is the most common shortcut we undo later. The old padding keeps breaking down under the new cover, the seams get bulky, and any smell stays in the chair. Stripping to the frame gives you a chair that is actually rebuilt.
Is reupholstering worth it on an ordinary chair?
If the frame is hardwood and the chair fits your body and your room, usually yes, because you end up with better-than-new construction under a fabric you chose. If the frame is particleboard, we will tell you to save the money. Every chair is different, so ask for an exact estimate.
Got a chair at the awkward stage? Send photos through our free online estimate form. We will tell you what is hiding under that fabric and what it would take to make it the best seat in the house again.
