I wanted to share a really simple project with you that is affordable and can really transform the look of your upholstered furniture.
If you have any chairs or sofas or even sectionals with ugly, outdated, cheap legs, you might consider this very fast DIY and be amazed at the transformation from a basic piece to something that looks so much more custom.
We recently bought this tan sectional sofa and it came with these hideous sofa legs.
They were dark brown and actually plastic. We are trying to move away from the dark wood tones in our house and into more bright and light woods and whites. So I ran over to Home Depot, where they have a bunch of styles of sofa legs and decided on these guys:
These were $7.38 each and I needed 12. So the project was just under $100 with tax. I know that sounds like a lot- especially since you just bought your sofa but wait for it… the difference is really worth the investment. Also we have a huge sectional- a smaller piece of furniture would be significantly less.
I already had stain at home (I like Minwax Golden Oak) and we just put the entire sofa on its side and slowly unscrewed all the plastic legs off. Sadly the plastic legs attached to the sectional with two large screws and our new legs attach with one screw.
My husband had to drill holes into the bottom of the new sofa (note this is a little tricky as the frame of the sofa might not be super high quality wood so easy going there.
We purchased threaded inserts for about $1 each and pushed those into the holes that we drilled. The threaded inserts will give the sofa legs you purchase something to screw into so you have a solid base for your sofa.
And then it was just a matter of staining the new legs on and screwing right into those threaded inserts. So simple!
Unfortunately my home improvement store didn’t have a ton of options for sofa legs so the ones I purchased were slightly taller than I would have liked. I would like for these legs to be maybe an inch shorter as it makes the couch just a little too tall. We considered trimming the legs down but ultimately decided not to bother with it. I think it looks fine and the couch is very comfortable in our family room. For the most part everyone has feet up in this room anyway.
And again the upgrade from the plastic legs to these made such a huge difference we don’t really mind the added height.
And here is another upholstered piece that we also tried this little hack. This chaise sits in our bedroom and it had really ugly dark brown block legs.
I found these 4 inch table legs at Home Depot for $3.28 each.
We unscrewed the block legs that came with the chair, used pliers or vice grips to unscrew the screw out of the block legs that came with the chair. The screw that came in the sofa legs we purchased was just a bit too short so we used pliers to pull that one out and replace with the screw from the original legs. You can see in the photo above the screw is very short. All in all that took about 2 minutes. Again I stained these legs the same Golden Chestnut color and all done!
So this chaise was quite easy to do because the original legs that came with the chaise only had one screw in it so there was no need to drill additional holes or add the inserts. This was only about $14 to totally update the look of that chair and it makes me so happy when I walk into our bedroom. My eyes used to go directly to those ghastly block chair legs and I was actually considering selling this chair. With the swap out in legs, it looks so much nicer and I decided to keep it after all.
These sofa legs are significantly cheaper than the ones I used on the sectional downstairs but I felt these legs were too thin and delicate for such a large sofa. They would look great on a smaller sofa though.
If you decide to try this little trick in your home, please come back and let me know how it works out! I’d love to be tagged in Instagram photos too (@frugaladventure). Also if any part of this is confusing to you, you can check out my Instagram stories here to see the complete project saved in my video highlights.
Here are links to all the products we used:
Thin Sofa Legs ($3.28 each) click here
Thicker Sofa Legs ($7.38 each) click here
I love the way you can upgrade your furniture on budget 🙂