Upholstery Finder/Guides/Reupholster or replace? The break-even on a sofa

Reupholster or replace? The break-even on a sofa

Most guides answer this with a percentage. Something like "reupholster if it costs less than half a new one." It sounds sensible and it's close to useless, because it compares your sofa to a sofa that doesn't exist yet.

The real question is narrower. Is the thing underneath the fabric worth keeping?

The test

Tip the piece over and look at the underside.

A hardwood frame, kiln-dried maple, oak, ash, joined with dowels or corner blocks and glue, not staples. Springs that are tied by hand, in eight directions, with twine. That frame will outlive you. A well-built piece like that can be recovered three or four times across a century, which is the arithmetic that actually matters: you are not comparing one recover to one new sofa, you are comparing one recover to a new sofa every eight to twelve years.

A softwood or engineered frame, pine, plywood, particle board, stapled together, sitting on a sheet of webbing or a serpentine wire spring. Recovering it costs the same labour as the good frame, because the work is the same work. You just end up with new fabric on a frame that was built to last eight years.

That's the whole decision, and it takes ninety seconds to make.

How to tell hand-tied from the other kind without taking anything apart

Reach under the deck, through the dust cover if there is a gap, or press down hard on the seat platform with the cushions off.

Hand-tied springs are coils, and you can feel the twine running across the tops of them in a grid. They give evenly and come back together. Serpentine springs are flat zigzag wires running front to back, and under a firm press you feel individual bars rather than a surface.

Neither one is a verdict on its own. Plenty of decent mid-century furniture uses serpentine wire and is worth saving for other reasons. But coils and twine on a hardwood frame is the combination that makes the money obviously worth spending.

The thing that catches people out

Good springs cost more to restore, not less.

Re-tying eight-way springs is slow, skilled handwork, and a shop doing it properly charges accordingly. Dropping new serpentine wire into a cheaper frame is faster. So the better sofa can carry the bigger invoice, which feels backwards right up until you remember it is also the sofa that will still be here in 2060.

Of the 185 furniture workrooms listed here, 27 name spring replacement as something they do. That is the group equipped to tell you which system you have and what restoring it costs.

The three-strikes rule

Here is the test that decides the hard cases. Ask whether the piece needs new foam, new springs, and frame reinforcement.

One of those, go ahead. Two, get the number in writing before you decide. All three and you are paying to rebuild a sofa from the frame outward, which costs more than a recover, and which lands you right back at the question of whether the frame deserved it.

What tips it the other way anyway

Two situations where the frame test doesn't get the last word.

You care about the piece. A chair your grandmother sat in has a value that isn't in this arithmetic. 71 of the 185 shops listed here name antique restoration as something they do, and quite a few of them do it because customers keep asking. Nobody needs a cost justification for keeping something.

It has to fit somewhere specific. Older furniture is often narrower, lower, or shaped for a room that modern furniture won't sit in. If you've measured the alcove and nothing in the shops fits it, recovering what you have stops being a comparison and starts being the only option.

There is a third, quieter one. Mid-century pieces in particular are frequently worth more restored than the restoration costs, and 11 of the shops here name mid-century work specifically. If the piece has a maker's mark, find out what it is before you decide anything.

When replacing is the honest answer

I'd rather say this plainly than pretend every piece deserves saving.

Replace it if the frame is stapled softwood and you don't love the piece. Replace it if the foam has collapsed and the springs have gone and the frame is racking when you sit down, which is the three-strikes case above.

And replace it if the quote comes in near the price of something you'd genuinely rather own. That does happen.

Getting the frame checked without guessing

You don't have to diagnose it yourself. The shops that do frame and spring work will tell you what they're looking at, and they're the ones qualified to say whether it's worth the money.

Of the shops listed here, 32 shops do frame repair, 27 do spring replacement, and 15 do webbing replacement. Those are the ones to ask. A shop that only recovers will recover whatever you bring, which is fine, but it won't tell you whether you should.

Get the piece in front of one of them. 85 of 185 shops here offer a free estimate and 31 will look at photographs first, so the diagnosis costs you nothing but a phone call.

Once you know the frame is worth it, what reupholstery actually costs has the numbers, and how long it takes has the timeline. Or go straight to the shops, by city.