How to Make a Couch

A living room sofa is one of the most essential pieces of furniture in a home. Yet, buying this piece of essential furniture can be challenging for many couples. Sofas aren’t cheap, and a couple starting usually doesn’t have much of a budget.

One great solution to this problem is to make a couch storage sofa. While making the kind of upholstered sectional sofa you might see in your local furniture store is challenging, you can make a simple storage sofa yourself relatively easily. All you need is an undersized plywood, cushions, and imagination.

You can design and build your sofa here in several ways, but we will use a simple design style. Then, I’ll talk about how you can modify that design style to make yourself a fancier couch.

You’ll want to use good-quality plywood for this. Plywood with many voids or cracks doesn’t look very good, even if it is cheaper. So look for either marine-grade plywood, applewood, or cabinet-grade plywood. If you can, ask them if it is guaranteed to be without voids. The three types I mentioned are usually void-free, but they may not be guaranteed.

Basic Sofa Design

If we break it down, the most basic sofa design consists of four pieces of fabric, all of which can be cut out of ¾-inch thick plywood. Those four pieces of couch fabric are:

• The seat

• The back

• The two ends or supports

The tricky part of this is getting the dimensions right. So, let’s start by looking at the essential dimensions of a standard sofa.

Basic sofa design

The critical dimensions in the drawing above are:

• The back of the seat is 18” above the floor but is angled upwards 5° towards the outer edge

• The seat is 24” deep

• The back of the sofa is angled backwards 15°

• The back height in the drawing is 26”, but sofa backs vary considerably in height.

Everything else in the design of a home project is predicated on coming up with those final dimensions. Please note that the dimensions I’ve given are for the seat at the top of the space for the cushion, not the space for the sofa cushions at the bottom of the seat cushion. So, if you are making a sofa with cushions, you must first adjust the seat height and depth to accommodate the thickness of excess fabric in your sofa cushions.

Making a Simple Sofa

The most straightforward sofa base and frame can be made by cutting two end pieces out of plywood, per the dimensions in the drawing above. Then cut two strips of plywood, 24” wide, by however long you want the sofa frame and base to be. Simply screwing those two pieces onto the ends would provide a couch frame.

Of course, there would be more detail to making it than that. One important thing would be to round all your corners and edges so that nobody would get scratched or hurt on your sofa. You will probably also want some cushions, whether to cushion the seat and back of a DIY couch furniture project or sofa itself or to make pillow top cushions or throw pillows that sit on large cushions on the seat cushion and back of a DIY couch or furniture projects.

A critical consideration for your DIY couch sofa is how much support you have to provide. If you make two end pieces, you will be limited to a full DIY couch frame about four feet long. To go any longer than that, you would either need another end piece to act as center support, or you would need to cut strips of plywood (roughly 2” wide) and attach them perpendicularly to the seat bottom, one at the front of diy sofa couch and one at the back, to act as supports.

Modifying the Basic Design

Maybe you don’t like this sofa design idea. After all, there are a lot of different styles of sofas out there. Okay, so how can we modify this basic design?

Adding Arms

The first modification we could do is to box the ends of the sofa. In this, we would not cut out the sofa and seat cushions as low as shown in the drawing but instead cut them higher. How much higher is more a question of styling than anything else, but if we want arms, it would be roughly nine inches taller. Then, we’d need to add some support pieces inside the ends for the back seat cushions to attach to.

If we want wider arms, we can add a strip of plywood about three to four inches wide or attach it to the top of the wooden bench frame with it underneath the existing wood component, perpendicular to the piece of wood, so it sticks out to the sides. This would give us a more comfortable arm and a place to drink.

Most commercial furniture goes beyond this idea for the arms, making the ends of the sofa boxes a solid wood frame with an inner and outer layer. The top of this box then becomes the arm of the sofa. It can either be finished wood or upholstered fabric, as you desire for personal preference.

Adding Legs

The other primary way of modifying the sofa design is to add legs instead of having the ends go to the floor. In this case, we will cut some of the bottoms of the existing limitations off so they won’t reach the foot when we finish assembling the new sofa. We can do this with any of the arm designs I just discussed.

If we want to add legs, we should probably box in the bottom of the sofa frame, or it might not look right. This isn’t a complete box, but rather only a lip on the front, giving the appearance of a package. The bottom of the ends and the bottom of this lip should meet the upholstery and be even. This is the same as I discussed in supporting a sofa longer than four feet.

The other thing that should be done is to add a piece of wood hidden behind this frame lip under the bed frame and underneath the couch, pillow, pillows, and sofa seat. These must be perpendicular to the other frame lip and the same size and distance from each end. The purpose of these two pieces of wood is to give us something to attach the legs to.

While making your legs possible, the easiest thing to do is to buy pre-made legs from your local home improvement center. Check the various ones, as they will carry different styles. These can be attached to the framework under the seat cushion or sofa, providing a different look.

Upholstering the Sofa

There are two basic ways of upholstering the sofa and couches, depending on what you want. Most of the time, sofas and couches are upholstered with cushions. It is rare to see couches with anything else. These cushions are easy to make; they are all foam rubber blocks with upholstery fabric covering.

You can make your cushions with basic sewing skills and access to a sewing machine. Typically, these have “piping” along the corners to help hold excess fabric from the couch, pillow, and covering fabric in place and make the shape of the cushion appear more squared off. That piping is available from any upholstery supply. It is covered with a strip of the fabric you use to wrap and protect all the fabric materials in the cushions together.