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. Recovering it is genuinely the cheaper option over any timescale longer than about a decade, and the piece you get back will be better than most things you can buy new at the same price.

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.

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. 35 of the 88 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.

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, at that point you're paying to rebuild the whole thing, which costs more than the recover and lands you back at the frame question anyway.

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, 17 shops do frame repair, 16 do spring replacement, and 6 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. 42 of 88 shops here offer a free estimate and 20 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.