How to Make A French-Style Bench From Old Chairs

Upcycle broken furniture by making a classic European style bench from old chairs that’s perfect for your entry, dining room or foot of your bed!

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As promised, here is a tutorial on how to make a high-arm bench from old chairs in a classic French/European style. With a few basic tools you can create a high-end looking bench from a pair of broken chairs and pine or scrap wood. It’s a great upcycle project!

The chairs we used were 50-ish year old knockoff Duncan-Phyfe style chairs (meaning, thin wood, cheaply made) that were falling apart. We’re calling this a “French-style” bench because I saw a similar bench from Ballard Designs (for $300+!) based on a French antique, but I’ve also seen this style simply called a “window bench” as well.

What I really tried to emphasize in the title, though, is that this isn’t one of those benches I’ve seen where they line two or more chairs up side-by-side and add a plywood seat to make a bench. Personally, I think those look kinda odd (sorry!) and this is a more classic style to me.

This how-to isn’t super thorough, meaning I don’t have pictures of every single step, because Brian did it himself without my help (how dare he?). We’ve tried to provide enough detail to at least be a starting point if you’d like to make a bench from old chairs, too.

Also, we are not woodworkers, carpenters, or craftsmen – just DIY-er’s figuring things out as we go along. There might be other (better?) ways to do this, but hopefully, you will be inspired and use this as a springboard to think about what you can do with old, broken chairs!

Last May I wrote about how we started this DIY bench with a set of these these fake Duncan-Phyfe dining chairs that, being all fake and poorly made, began to fall apart on us – literally. After I made over our new, sturdy  ($5!) Craigslist dining chairs, these were sent to a shed, waiting for…what? I don’t know, we just couldn’t get rid of them.

Then one fine day, Brian just decided to make a bench from the chair backs, with no help or prodding from me. This is odd, because usually our DIY projects go like this:

Me: “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did                         (fill in the blank with crazy, time-intensive diy or remodeling project)?”

Brian: “No.”

Me: “But we could                           (fill in way to do it cheap or easy) and all you’d need to do would be                        .” 

Brian: “Well…”

So paint me surprised with this project – and happily, since it’s turned out to be one of my favorite projects ever!

How to Make a Bench From Old Chairs

Step One: Find Two Chairs

• Look for chairs that look good from the side. Chairs that have a slight curve to them are best. The backs need to be one piece from the top down to the back legs. Also think about the height of the chair backs (ours are 16″ from the top of the bench seat) and if they have a cross-piece spanning the back legs where the wood for the seat can easily be attached.
• Remove the front legs and seats. These knock-off Duncan Phyfe chair seats were held on by four screws. The legs were falling off and just pulled apart – the glue no longer held the dowels tightly.

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Step Two: Create The Bench Seat

• Make a rectangle box the length you’d like the bench to be and secure the ends with two wood screws each, as pictured above (ours was 36″ x 12″). Use a sturdy hardwood and long 3.5-inch screws on each corner to make the box as immovable as you can. We salvaged the wood for our box from a portion of an Ikea oak countertop we didn’t need when we remodeled our bathroom. Brian cut the sides into 1″x 2-1/4″ pieces (oak boards like these are similar).
• Attached the box to each chair back by screwing from the chair into the short ends of the box. It’s hard to see in the above picture, but the dark slat of wood is the part of the chair back that the original seat was attached to. Brian drilled holes and then used three screws spaced evenly across this slat to securely hold the ends of the box to the backs. He also drilled through the legs of the chair to be able to insert two 3-inch screws into the box from the back of each leg– for a total of seven screws on each end. Whew- you can probably guess why I’m emphasizing secure at this point- our whole goal was to actually be able to sit on the bench!

Step Three: Create A Bottom Shelf

• Even after making the seat bench as secure as possible, the bench was still too wobbly for anyone to sit on, so Brian made another box – this one is smaller and made from stock wood 1″x 2″s. He carefully measured each piece, attaching first the long pieces to the chair legs and then the short pieces to the ends of the long pieces (clear as mud? Hopefully the picture above helps clarify!), as opposed to the first box, which was made first and then attached (our measurements: 12 3/4″ x 41 1/8″ – so it fit exactly between the legs as they curved). Again, use the longest screw you can without going through to the front of the legs.
• Make a “top” for the shelf using flat molding. We didn’t want the heavy look of a full plywood top, so we used some 3/4″ x 1″ molding we had. It’s the kind that is flat on one side and has rounded edges on the top (sorry, I’m not sure of the name of it- or even what we used it for originally, but it’s similar to this). Brian just measured, cut, and used small finish nails to attach them to the top of the shelf, 7″ apart on center. They probably would’ve looked more finished if they were set into the shelf (rather than sitting on top), but this was easy and looks fine to us.

Step Four: Fill Holes And Paint

• Fill all the holes with wood filler and a putty knife, allow to dry and then sand them smooth, as well as all of the surfaces to prepare them for paint. You may have noticed from the pictures that Brian put many large holes into the bench in his effort to make it sturdy. He does this whenever he makes something because he knows I’m the “queen of putty” around here and can usually fill whatever he sends my way. We’re pretty much a team that way. It also helps that our mantra is “cottage = imperfect.”
• Paint the bench. You probably should start with a primer, but I didn’t {gasp}. I used my nifty new paint sprayer that I reviewed here and put three light coats of my favorite warm-white color, Behr’s Creamy White.

Step Five: Make Plywood Seat Top

• Cut a piece of 1/2-inch plywood in the dimensions of your bench to sit on top of the bench.
• Cover the plywood with quilt batting (cut about an inch bigger than the wood) and your choice of material- cut at least two inches bigger all around than the top. I used simple painter’s drop cloth. HOW: Turn the raw edges of the material under, pull the batting and material tight around to the bottom and use a staple gun to secure. I used a piece of dropcloth to cover our bench top.
• As you can see, our top is not yet attached to the box (uh-em). We did eventually use L-brackets and attached it from the bottom with small screws.

Update #1! Brian made a video for you to help explain the steps even more:

Then all you’ve got left is to decide if you want to leave the bench as is or add a cushion.

Update #2! The cushion is done:

I made this mattress-style cushion from dropcloth and it looks great!!

Visit this post for a complete tutorial on how to make your own French Mattress Cushion.

What do you think? Is this a great way to rescue broken chairs, or what?

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