The Most Comfortable Seat in the House

Ah, the best seat in the house.  There is something just quite right with the way it feels when you sit down on it.  It is inviting and familiar.  Make yourself at home.

OK, this is more a fixer-upper story and a fable of breathing new life into a piece of furniture destined for the trash heap.

This chair at my parent's house has been around forever so it could be a half a century old.  I don't recall how it was acquired but it is typical of chairs found in Chinese restaurants. Usually the surplus furniture or discards from there would be reused by frugal immigrant workers and passed along.  Maybe that would explain the Asian fascination with IKEA, the same purposeful design mantra that you would find in a restaurant supply house.  My mother would always sew a seat cushion from fabric scraps she had from the garment factory.  Anyway, we had a bunch of these chairs when we were growing up.  They served as nightstands, TV dinner trays, homework study tables, bookcases, clothes racks, places to put your stuff, and to be cleared off when guests needed a seat.  The best was when my brothers and I would stack them up in various configurations to mimic a jet fighter, yes, two chairs laid down back to back was the cockpit and two chairs over would be the sliding canopy.  They also served as the framework to erect tents when you threw a blanket over them.  And it made a good maze to chase and play with the dog.

As you can see, the seat panel has been worn through the generations of use.  What to do.  Yeah, you could just chuck it and get a new one but the legs and back are still sturdy.  It would be a shame to toss out something with sentimental value.  Lemme see what I can do to fix it up.

Got a good story and picture of your favorite chair?  Chairs like most furniture are conversation pieces.  If they could only talk. Post it and tell me about it below.  I don't have a penny for your two cents but I do have a couple of one-year Pro memberships to pass on for your tale.
    

Step 1 Assess the situation...

One old beat up chair.

If you sit on it, your butt goes through the chair.

The seat panel is worn through.  It was a thin veneer plywood to begin with.  It has been thinned by use and cracked under pressure from things sitting on top of it.

I know the chair has been through some scrubbing with a bucket of water and soap.  That is how you cleaned things in the old days.  There was no such thing as a can of furniture polish that you spray and wipe.

Everything except the seat bottom is still serviceable.

The proper fix is to remove the seat bottom layer from the chair frame and replace it with a similar thin piece of plywood.

I believe they were slightly formed to fit the curve of one's bottom either by some carving or steam bending of the plywood.

That would take some time in the workshop along with some heavy duty tools to remove the seat bottom and form a new one.

There is an lazier easier way!

Comments

[effiesque]

definately a conversation starter. Epic.

[RedneckEngineer]

This was not what I expected when I seen the pic but once I started reading it reminded me of a chair from my childhood. Growing up we use to visit my grandparents back in the hollar where you had to pump in sunlight to see. Anyway when we would visit I was always given this little chair that granpa had made way back when my mother was little, and grandma used as a stepstool. The chair looked like a adarondac (sp?) type chair but the seat was made to be removed. For years I played and sat on that chair. Then getting to a certain age boys get to when things start to make you think. I got to really looking at the seat and seen that the chair that I was playing with was actually a potty chair. The back of the chair, that had a hole in it, could be detached from the chair and swapped for the seat. It was a multipurpose chair that had suddenly grossed me out! I never sat in that seat again. Thanks for reminding me of that chair. I havent thought about that in over 35+ years.

[caitlinsdad]

Thank you Mr. Harvey, for the rest of the story...