Reupholstering a Rocking Chair

Tess and I have had our eye on rocking chairs as they show up at our neighborhood Goodwill, but have resisted the impulse since we have no room for furniture in our house. haha. Well we finally gave into the urge for this steal-of-a-deal. We bought it for a whopping $15 with the intention of making a project of it. We then dropped about $25 on supplies at JoAnns Fabrics to fix it up.

We chose a blue canvas fabric because I vetoed all floral patterns (this ain’t your grandma’s rocking chair!), and all “modern” patterns are too busy with dots and lines.

What is funny is that we picked a color that we thought matched our couch, but when we got back it became apparent just how far off it was. 

It’s interesting how bad our perception of the world around us can differ from reality… 

even for something which we sit on every day!

It is structurally in great shape. It has some worn edges from being rocked into things. The upholstery was a hideous mess and the padding consisted of what looked like a rat’s nest of straw.

I removed all the old fabric and padding in an archaeological dig which revealed that someone had previously made a sloppy attempt to cover up the original fabric.

The coil springs aren’t yet sprung and still have some spring in them, but needed to be retied in place.

I found some useful websites on how to tie the springs in place. It’s fairly straightforward. Here are some nice how-to’s on upholstering, upholstering, and tying coil springs.We didn’t really follow any of these exactly. We got the general idea and used common sense to make it work for our chair. It turned out comfortable and looks pretty good, so I think it all worked out.

I put burlap across the springs for several reasons which I thought made sense: to provide a uniform taut surface to distribute the load, keep the foam pad from sinking into the spaces around the springs and to provide some protection to the foam pad so it doesn’t get eaten by the springs.

I staple-gunned the burlap to wooden frame with a layer of paperboard from the recycle bin. This cardboard helps provide some protection to the burlap from the staples (since the springs are pushing up on the burlap). One day future archaeologists will dissemble this chair and find instructions for cooking a cardboard pizza on the back of paperboard strips. J

Tacking the canvass to the frame was very tedious. These decorative tacks look nice, but are annoying to work with. It takes patience and a lot of extra tacks…

So anyway, there you have it. Not perfect, but I’m impressed at how well it turned out. Overall it was a fun project. And now we have a chair that totally rocks!