How to Reupholster an Office Chair

Beth
by Beth
1 Material
30 Minutes
Easy
In this post, I'll show you how to disassemble an office chair in order to reupholster it. Here's a photo of the finished chair, to give you an idea of what you can accomplish.

Bonded leather starts to peel over time (see my chair below), and many office chairs are covered with bonded leather. I've had this chair for about five years, so it's got plenty of life left in it, but it looks terrible!
This will vary based on the type of chair you have, but for my chair, I had to take out four screws underneath to remove the wheels. I had the right size Allen wrenches because I saved them from when I first got the chair. I recommend saving all Allen wrenches from any furniture assembly project, just in case you need to take them apart in the future.
Keep your tools and screws in a small container so you don't lose them. Disassembling the chair only took about half an hour, but the full reupholstering project took a couple of days to complete, so it's important to store these safely.
You can see the holes where the wheels attached to my seat cushion here.
And the corresponding holes in the seat cushion. My chair had helpful labels on the inside once I took it apart, so it was easy to put back together. Here you can see that the front of the cushion is labeled. The arms of my chair were also labeled If your chair isn't labeled, take lots of pictures of before you take it apart. It's easy to forget what it looked like before you disassembled it!
For the arms, I had to remove decorative screw covers. They pop out pretty easily if you wedge your fingernail under them. There were three screws holding each arm to the seat cushions.


Underneath the arm, there were two screws holding the arm cushions on.
Here it is completely disassembled and ready for reupholstering.


Now your office chair is disassembled and ready for reupholstering. See the second part of this tutorial on my blog: https://mermaidsden.com/blog/2017/01/21/how-to-reupholster-office-chair
Suggested materials:
  • Allen wrenches
Beth
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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