This And That Hunters: Office Chair Redo

A few days ago, I decided to move an office chair down to my son's bedroom for use at his desk down there. Since his bedroom is in the basement, I decided that the current black color of the chair was too dark for his room. So, I concluded that I should recover the seat and spray paint the plastic back to make it a lighter color.

In college, I worked in an upholstery shop on the campus of my university. We recovered a lot of office chairs from offices and computer labs around campus, and I had a chance to personally do a few while I was there. So I was fairly confident that I could be successful recovering a chair for my son. Recovering an office chair is easier than you might think. You just need to know a couple of things and to have the right tools.

The first thing I did was to gather a few tools. To take apart the chair, I used a hex key for the bolts (sometimes all you need is a screwdriver) as well as a flathead screwdriver and a pair of pliers to take out the staples. Instead of a flathead screwdriver, you can use a specialized upholstery staple remover tool. It is definitely easier than using a screwdriver, and probably fewer staples will fly across the room when you pry them up. However, I don't have a specialized tool and didn't want to buy one since I don't know how soon I will ever need one again.

So the first step to take apart the chair was to turn it over and take the bottom and back off by unscrewing the bolts with the hex key. On this particular chair, I was left with three separate pieces: the base, the back, and the seat of the chair. I carefully saved the bolts and hex key in a safe place so they would be there when I put the chair back together. There are few things as frustrating as being almost finished with a project and not being able to find the pieces you need to put the thing back together.

Once the seat was apart from the rest of the chair, I started taking out the staples. I used the head of my screwdriver to pry up the staples, and I usually had to pull them the rest of the way out with my pliers.

The first piece of fabric I removed was the black piece that basically serves to cover the raw ends of the upholstery fabric. I intended to reuse this fabric, so I put it aside to save. In the upholstery shop where I worked, we usually saved this piece for reuse. On my chair, there were holes already in the fabric where the bolts went through the fabric. If I wanted to put another piece of fabric for the bottom, I would have saved the piece any way as a template of where to put the holes.

The next step was to take the upholstery fabric off the seat. I once again pried the staples up and pulled them out. Now I had all the fabric taken off my seat piece.

Now I was ready to cut a piece of fabric to recover the seat. For the last part of the project, the tools I used were a pencil, a pair of fabric scissors, a staple gun ( you can use a power one, but I didn't), a hammer, and the hex key to put the bolts back in.

I used the old piece of fabric as a rough template. I just drew around the old piece of fabric, making my new piece of fabric a bit bigger than the old one. For an office chair, I have learned that you usually want to cut a bigger piece of fabric than you will need. It is always pretty easy to cut off excess fabric. Adding more fabric if you need it is pretty much impossible. (For some other upholstery projects, you need to cut the exact shape and size of fabric you need because you will have to sew it to other pieces. But with office chairs, there is usually only one piece, so if you cut extra, you will be better off.)

Sometimes at the upholstery shop, we would add some batting to the chair at this stage. The padding on this particular chair wasn't very worn down, so I didn't do that for this project. So, at this point, I began to staple the fabric to the chair. When you staple fabric you want to be sure to pull the fabric fairly tight. Fabric stretches over time, so you want to pull it kind of tight---not so tight that the staples will tear the fabric when you sit down, but tight enough to account for the fabric stretching so that you don't get sagging and folds in your chair seat down the road.

So, I first put in two staples to anchor the fabric from front to back on the seat. On this chair, I used a striped fabric. It was important to make sure the stripes were running straight down the seat, so I marked the middle of the wood and made sure the same stripe ran all the way from one mark to the other. You also want to be aware which side of the fabric is up. Most fabrics have a right side and a wrong side, and sometimes when someone wasn't paying attention, they put quite a few staples in for realizing the fabric was going to end up inside out.

The next thing to do was to put in two more staples to anchor each of the sides where they should be. At this point, my fabric was anchored in place, and I began to staple it on. I was taught to start from the staples you have already put in and work toward a corner. That way, since the corner is rounded, you can gently pull the fabric into the place you need it be to make sure you don't have a giant fold at the corner. It's usually not possible to eliminate every fold, but you want to keep it fold-free as much as possible. So I worked towards each corner from each of the sides until I finally had my fabric secured to my seat. (Another quick note: you want to leave room for the staples you'll put in the other piece of fabric between your staples on this piece of fabric and the edge of the wood.)

I had a lot of extra fabric, so I trimmed about a half an inch away from the staples. It turned out looking pretty good.

The next step was to put my black piece of fabric with the bolt holes in it back on the bottom of the seat. I basically used the same process as before, anchoring it in place on all four sides first before putting the rest of the staples in. You want to cover all the raw edges and all your previous staples. This time, I didn't necessarily have to work toward each corner. So now, my seat was completely recovered.

I decided to spray paint the back of the chair to make it match the new fabric better. Then, I put the back and base back onto the seats. (How glad am I that I put all the bolts and the hex key in a safe place?)