Has one of your dining room chairs started to sag in the middle? Have you been putting off repairing that broken dining room chair because you thought it would too difficult or take too much time? Well now you can stop putting off repairing it, because we’ll show you how to repair that broken chair seat in a few easy steps. The entire process took should take you less than an hour, and you only need a few basic tools to get the job done.

Materials Required

• 1 – 24″ x 24″ piece of 1/2″ plywood or MDF
• OPTIONAL: new fabric if you want to change the look
• OPTIONAL: new padding if you want to make it a little softer

Tools Needed

• Screwdriver – phillips head
• Staple remover or an old small flat head screwdriver
• Staple gun
• Saw – jig saw or bandsaw
• Pencil or marker

Step 1: Remove the broken seat from the chair

The first step in repairing the broken chair seat is to remove the seat from the chair. Typically, there are about four screws holding the seat in place. Flip the chair over, locate the screws and simply unscrew them.

Step 2: Pull the staples and remove upholstery

Once you have the seat off the chair, it’s time to start removing the old upholstery. Our demo chair had some new upholstery added on top of the original, so there we actually had to remove both layers (as you can see in the photos below). Oh the joy of pulling twice as many staples!

Use a staple remover or a small flat head screwdriver to pull the staples out. Depending on your fabric pattern, the staples may be difficult to see. If you pull up gently on the fabric you should be able to find where the resistance is and that will lead you to the staples.

If your chair seat is as broken as the one in our example below, be careful to not damage it more – we need it as a template in our next step.

Step 3: Trace the broken seat and cut a new one

Once you have all of the staples removed and the fabric and padding pulled away from the old chair seat, carefully lift the seat out and lay it on the material you’ll be using for the new piece. TIP: Try to not move the fabric and padding too much, that way they are already in position for you when you have your new seat cut out.

We just happened to have a piece of 1/2″ plywood laying in the shop from a previous project that was already the right depth for the seat, so we just used that. However, you can also use 1/2″ MDF or hardboard.

Lay the old seat so that the longest straight edge is flush with one edge of your plywood – this will reduce how much cutting you need to do in the next step. Then trace the other four sides with a pencil or marker. At this point, you can chuck the old seat as it is no longer needed.

Now use your jig saw (or bandsaw, which is what we used just because it happened to be set up already) to cut along that line. Stay as close to the line as possible, but your cuts don’t have to be perfect – the fabric will hide any minor imperfections.

Step 4: Re-upholster and reattach the seat to the chair

Now that you have new seat cut out, it’s time to reattach the upholstery. We made certain to not move the old materials, so we were able to just lay the new seat in place and start the upholstering process.

We won’t go into too much detail as to how to do the upholstery here – but the basics are simple. Start by putting a single staple in the center of one side, and then pulling the fabric tight on the opposite side and stapling the center there. Now, repeat that on the other two sides and work your way to the corners. Once you’re at the corners, fold the fabric over, staple, then fold it back and staple it again.

That’s it. That’s how easy it is to repair a broken chair seat. Of course, since you have the chair apart, you may want to change out the upholstery or add some fresh foam cushion. Though that means you’ll probably want to the rest of the chairs in your dining set to match because you’ll be too impressed with the results of just one!

P.S. yes, we did put both layers of upholstery back onto our chair. The padding was sold old that if we tried to separate the first layer of upholstery from it, the glue was just going to pull the padding completely apart – and we didn’t have any spare padding laying around.

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