Turning Two Chairs Into Bench

by Diane Williams

3 Materials

$30

8 Hours

Medium

Take an old chair or two and reinvent it by making a bench.

I started with 2 garage sale chairs and the outcome was a beautiful bench.

I purchased 2 chairs from a garage sale. $3 each not bad at all. The chairs didn't have any arm rests and one was painted. That didn't matter for what I was going to do with them. The first thing I did was strip the wicker off. It was missing in some spots and overall in bad condition. I did that by using a pair of snips and just snipping and pulling it off.

Then I lightly sanded the backs of the chairs and the bottom with a 120 grit sandpaper.

I needed to make arm rests for the chairs. Sorry for the awful drawing. I have already sold the bench so not able to retake pics. I traced out my arm rests (2) and rest post (2) Once they were created from scrap wood I had, I attached them to the chair.

I needed to make arm rests for the chairs. I traced out my arm rests (2) and arm rest post (2) Once they were created from scrap wood, I attached them to the chair.

You can see the arm rest started as a triangular shape and then I rounded it at the end. This was 1/2" plywood. The the Arm Rest support is just a 1x2 to support the arm rest and it's attached both to the chair and the arm rest. The red arrows show where the screws were put.

Sorry there aren't more step by step pics, I have already sold the bench so not able to retake pics.

I then measured the size of the seat I wanted. I cut out a piece of plywood for the seat that was the length of both chairs together with the distance in between the chairs I wanted it. The depth was the depth of the seat I wanted. Since I already had the arm rests, I had to account for those as well.

This is just a mock up of how to do this. Cutting the plywood just the right length and width so it's a rectangle.

I took fabric and laid it down.

I took the batting, I believe I used about 1/2 " and laid this on top of the fabric. Then laid the board I had cut down over the batting so that none of the batting hung over (showed from under the board). I took the fabric and pulled it over the plywood. I used a staple gun to stapled it to the board. Creasing the corners nicely as I pulled it up and stapled it.