If you’ve shopped around for new custom furniture or reupholstery, you’ve probably heard wide ranges of estimates for how much fabric is needed for your project.
As upholsterers, we prefer to be conservative in how much fabric we request so that we don’t end up needing more mid-project, running the risk that we can’t finish the project. Some upholsterers take advantage of the complexity of these estimates to cushion the profitability of the project. For example, if your sofa only needs 16 yards of fabric, the upholsterer can claim they need to purchase 20 yards and then only order 16 yards, pocketing hundreds of dollars.
There are a number of images floating around the web (see below) that will give an idea of what your piece will require. Keep in mind that many of these images reflect the bare minimum yardage assuming no mistakes, nothing left over for toss pillows, no pattern matching, no piping (welt), etc.
As a good rule of thumb, your chair, sofa, loveseat, sectional, etc would need 4 yards of fabric for the two arms, plus about 2 yards per linear foot between the arms (2.2 yards with a pattern).
Example 1: 7 foot sofa with 6 inch arms = 16 yards of fabric (4 + 2*6).
Example 2: club chair with 10 inch rolled arms = 9 yards fabric (4 + 2*2.5)
Example 3: Sectional with outside length of 24 ft and 6 inch arms = 44 yards (4 + 2*20). Note, with sectionals we take off 3 ft from the length so we don’t double count the corner piece.
