The Working Upholsterer’s Bible · Tools
Pick your piece, how it’s built and the fabric — and get a ballpark cost and bench-time, worked out on our own workshop’s real rates.
Ballpark total
£0
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A genuine ballpark, not a quote. It uses our workshop’s £80/hour rate, the project hours and fabric yardages from the book, and average material costs. A real price depends on the actual piece in front of us — condition, fabric, and what we find once it’s stripped.
Every quote we write has three parts, and this tool follows the same method. Labour is the estimated bench-hours for the piece multiplied by our hourly rate of £80 — the rate that falls out honestly once you count only the hours you can genuinely bill. Materials are split in two: the show fabric (your chosen yardage at your chosen price) and the sundries — webbing, springs or foam, stuffing, calico, wadding, tacks and twine — with the usual allowance folded in. Contingency adds a slice on top of labour for the unforeseen: the frame repair that wasn’t visible at the quote stage, or fabric that turns out harder to handle than expected.
That £80 is the workshop’s rate, not a personal wage — and it isn’t £80 each. It pays the rent, the running costs and a living wage for both of us: Pat runs the office and the books, and I’m at the bench. That’s exactly why only a fraction of a working week can actually be billed — it’s a small workshop keeping its lights on, not money we pocket.
No two chairs are the same, and the honest answer to “what will it cost?” is always a range until the piece is on the bench. Treat the lower figure as a best case on a sound frame and a straightforward fabric, and the upper as the realistic allowance once the usual surprises are accounted for.
The single biggest lever on cost is which of the two ways the job is built. Modern work means foam cut to shape over a ply or sprung platform, a Dacron wrap and a stapled top cover — far quicker, lower in cost, and right for everyday pieces. Traditional work means stripping the piece to the frame and rebuilding it by hand with webbing, hand-tied coil springs, fibre or hair stuffing stitched into shape, then calico, wadding and the top cover. It is slow, it is all hand skill, and it lasts for decades. A wing-back done modern might be eight bench-hours; done traditionally it is twenty.
On a big piece, fabric can outweigh everything else. A 3-seat sofa needs around 14.6 metres; the difference between a £20 budget cloth and a £120 designer weave on that one job is well over a thousand pounds. Settle on your fabric before anything else, and if you’re measuring up yourself, our fabric yardage calculator will tell you exactly how much to buy. For the full pricing method — setting a rate, building a quote, fixed versus hourly — see the pricing & quoting chapter.
If you’re doing it yourself, the core kit:
upholstery staple gun (paid link), tack hammer (paid link), webbing stretcher (paid link), ripping chisel (paid link), and upholstery shears (paid link).
Get it priced properly
Send us a photo and a few details for a free, no-obligation quote from our West Yorkshire workshop. We’re AMUSF-accredited and fully insured, with £5 million of public liability cover. Get a quote → · or ask the upholsterer a question.