Saving a Sad Old Chair: Adding New Legs to a Favorite Chair

Level: Easy+ (Super easy if you have the right tools, probably more difficult if not)

Time: 20 minutes

Materials: Scrap wood, furniture legs, a drill, and possibly a nail gun (up to you!)

This is my all time favorite chair.

It was in my parents' house when I was younger, my first apartment after college, and every place I've lived since. I LOVE this chair. It's so comfy. The perfect size for napping.

But as you can see, it looks, well, sad. On top of looking sad, it also has no feet. This chair spent some time in my parents' basement while we were moving and they had to take the feet off to fit it down the stairs.

The difficult part came when we tried to put the feet back on.

This is the box of "feet" that came off the chair. There are either way too many or way too few pieces of wood. I'll never know because we couldn't figure out how to put them back together on the chair.

So my only choice: add new legs!

This was a "figure it out as you go" project. I'd say it was mildly successful. It worked, but I don't totally love how it turned out. But that's ok! It's part of the fun. More on that later. For now...

STEP 1

This chair didn't have any place to screw the new legs into, so I had to create a place. For that, I needed wood. It doesn't really matter what kind. It just has to be thick enough to screw the legs into. I think the wood I used was half an inch thick. It doesn't matter how long it is. Here's what I used:

Now we have to attach the wood to the chair. There are a few ways to do this. I used a nail gun. I LOVE my nail gun. It's battery operated (so no air tanks or anything) and makes it SO easy to attach pieces of wood. If you don't have a nail gun (and don't want to buy one) you could screw the pieces of wood on with a drill, hammer in some nails, or maybe even use some type of super glue? There are lots of options. But the nail gun is definitely the easiest.

Just to give you an idea of what I'm working with, there's the underside of the chair.

I attached one piece of wood into each corner so there would be a place to screw the legs into.

STEP 2

In order to screw the legs in, I had to drill a hole in the middle of each piece of wood. I used a Ryobi drill and drill bit (I have no idea what size, I never pay attention. I just eyeball it). The best part about the Ryobi drill and nail guns are that the batteries are interchangeable! But that's a sidenote.

STEP 3

All that's left is to screw the legs in!

STEP 4

This chair was obviously falling apart, so I bought an elastic slipcover to put over it. I have some mixed feelings about this slipcover. It didn't fit super well, but it is a weird sized chair.

The chair also has that dust ruffle thing on the bottom, so I tried to fold it up into the slipcover and that didn't work super well either. But either way, here's the finished project!

As you can see, good not great, which is why I call it a mildly successful project.

This project's imperfections: the chair legs are shorter than I was hoping, it's still pretty low to the ground. I bought 3 inch legs but I should've gone with 4 inches at least. The slipcover didn't fit that well, it was pretty lumpy and wrinkly.

Probably not our best project ever, but it's a playroom chair so it doesn't matter too much!

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