Transform Your Space With These Unexpected Ways To Repurpose A Broken Chair

It's amazing that people ever make it to bed at night or to work in the morning. The average home is like a minefield of comfortable places to sit, inviting you to cease any forward progress and take a load off before you even get in the front door. You can pull up a seat in the entryway, at the ends of very long hallways, at various stations within the kitchen, and in the bathroom ... in case using the built-in seating there wasn't what you came for. As often as we apparently like to sit, it stands to reason that we spend a lot of time thinking about (and shopping for) chairs.

As the rules of probability go, if there are more chairs than grains of sand in the oceans, there will be more than a few broken chairs. Re-weaving wicker or fixing the leg on a broken chair can be easy enough to DIY, but would cost you the opportunity to buy more chairs, so that's obviously out of the question. What you need instead is a project for reusing those broken chairs for other purposes, like to create a bench, picture frame, or plantstand. Ideally, the project will be something that you can do while sitting down. Pull up a seat and see if you can repurpose your broken chair into a brand-new decoration or furniture piece for your home.

Any two people might disagree about the design of a particular chair, but we can all agree that any chair worthy of the name holds you off the floor. That's what YouTuber @flippingdrawers saw in two discarded chairs — the structure for a bench. He starts by rehabbing the rickety chairs, positioning them side-by-side, then adding a back and seat from a slab of spalted beech he had on hand. After a bit of finishing, the result is a great-looking rustic bench perfect for wood lovers.

An upside-down ladderback chair of the right style looks almost as if it were made for this hack from YouTuber Madison (@maxtanicfilmsdiy), which can stand up to the most stylish towel storage ideas for the bathroom. Construction for this project is fairly simple ... you're essentially just removing the back of the chair, inverting it, and screwing it to the bathroom wall. Madison adds a coat of black paint covered with white crackle paint for a near-instant aging effect. Use this trick in other spaces, like a rustic back porch or a potting shed.

There are lots of ways of using the caning from an old or broken chair, and it often results in DIY craft projects that look more polished than usual, because caning isn't a common craft material and it looks great even with a little age. The task here is to find glass candle jars with a perfectly cylindrical shape. Then cut the caning from an old chair, soak it in water, and hot glue them to the glass, as seen in this YouTube video from @CanterburyCottage.

Create a coat rack — or hat rack, scarf rack, whatever-you-need rack — with off-the-shelf hooks and the back of a quaint and ornate chair. This version from YouTuber @JamiRayVintage is a simple project for anyone to DIY. But it still looks great, has shabby chic panache, and the video includes a couple of bonus projects you should have a look at, too. The chair (along with the several coats you're sure to add to it) can end up being deceptively heavy, so mount your coat rack to your wall studs.

This @CanterburyCottage project involves using two chair legs and a spindle to create a frame within which you can suspend a picture, plaque, or pretty much anything else to add a little vintage kitsch to its presentation. There's a base on bottom, spindle on top, and the two sawn-down legs doing the work on the sides. This presentation works particularly well with slightly unexpected contents like the J. D. Salinger quotation the creator uses here.

Whatever else you can use them for, legs are legs — and you can move legs from a chair to some other project with relatively little effort or drama. Similarly, a platform is a platform, whether it's supporting more decor or a nice movie-night meal. Combine the two and you have this tray/riser from YouTuber @CanterburyCottage with little legs sufficient to give objects a boost over competing pieces nearby (as a riser) or to lift your soup course over your legs (as a TV tray), or 100 other possibilities.

As evidenced from the iMac G4 on his desk in the background, it's clear that YouTuber @woodworkinghobby doesn't let old things go without a fight. In this case, it's not even much of a fight, because he simply removes a worn-out office chair from its base, then affixes a finished wooden round to it. Voila ... plant stand, low stool, drummer throne, or whatever other purpose you can imagine. A bit of paint (and perhaps sacrificing the raise and lower mechanism) would make this project even more refined.

You know those once-ubiquitous sling-style patio chairs you get with patio sets from Home Depot and just about everywhere else? These are the ones in your backyard that you haven't used in 10 years because the fabric is dry-rotted. Vashon Borich upcycled hers by replacing the nylon mesh with weatherproofed strips of pallet wood. The wood follows the curves of the chair, so they're nearly as comfortable as the originals. Pro tip: upgrade to fully threaded decking screws rather than using the less-than-weatherproof drywall screws.

While a chair is good for providing structure, part of the appeal of repurposed furniture is adding kitschy fun to your decor. That's a good thing, but it's not the only thing, and sometimes you can make something pretty refined that doesn't look repurposed at all. Witness this farm bench from YouTuber @AnOregonCottage, made by facing two broken chairs to each other and joining them together. Give the bench a strong seat from a single piece of wood, and add some paint and a cushion the right width for your bench.