Legs-ellent: how replacing legs of your home furniture could hugely improve it

“She’s got legs, she knows how to use them,” American rock band ZZ Top’s lead vocalist Billy Gibbons sang in the 1980s – but your home’s furniture, too, could find a pretty good use for legs. New legs, that is – as you could be pleasantly surprised by how large a difference these can make.

True, you might deem this furniture’s existing legs ‘good enough’ – and, even if you inadvertently break them, there’s a chance that they could easily be repaired rather than replaced. However, affixing new legs to furniture pieces is more straightforward than you might have anticipated.

Could you really just fix broken legs?

“Take these broken wings and learn to fly again,” another ‘80s singer, this time Richard Page of rock band Mr Mister, once sung – and you might be able to take broken furniture legs and learn to fix them, provided you heed advice shared by furniture restorer Crystal Dvorak with Popular Mechanics.

For example, if legs of your furniture have loosened, you could sand those parts of the legs facing the furniture, allowing the glue to take a stronger hold. You should then apply wood glue before clamping the leg firmly in place.

Dvorak insists: “You also have to use fasteners. You have to pre-drill to keep the wood from splitting, then drive two screws that give you at least two inches of bite into the leg.”

When furniture might benefit more from replaced than repaired legs

If a certain table or desk in your home rocks up and down as pressure is lifted from and placed on it, it’s possible that one of that furniture’s legs is shorter than the others. Though you could remedy the issue by fastening nail-on glides to the three non-problem legs, another potential solution is replacing the shorter leg entirely – if you can find a new leg of the right length.

Fortunately, you might not particularly struggle to find such a furniture leg if you opt to peruse online, where you could find precise measurements of replacement legs that are on offer. Even if you only need one replacement leg, you could consider buying several in order to give your furniture a pleasing new aesthetic twist.

How could new legs transform your furniture for the better?

For a few ideas, you could look at this BuzzFeed roundup of before-and-after photos showing how different an array of furniture pieces could look with new legs.

The furniture doesn’t even need to have originally served as furniture. For example, in attaching legs to a suitcase, you could turn it into a vintage side table – and, when an old stereo is given legs, it can effectively become a sideboard.

However, new furniture legs can fulfil a surprising practical purpose, too. For example, investing in breakfast bar legs can help you to create a breakfast bar of a suitable height for your kitchen. The average height of a breakfast bar is about 42 inches, according to House Beautiful; however, your particular kitchen might call for something taller or shorter than this.