I finally took a couple of wooden chairs to the dump yesterday. I’d bought them over 30 years ago. Originally, it was a set. A drop leaf table and four chairs. I was living on Gabriola Island and was working in my pottery studio when a couple of fellas in a pickup truck came down the driveway with this ‘patio set’ in the back. They explained that they worked in a sheltered workshop, this table and chairs set was a prototype of sorts. A practice run. Now they hoped to sell it to get money to buy more wood. Well, it all made perfect sense to me. They wanted a hundred dollars and I had a hundred dollars.
Little did I know that I’d be hauling these heavy duty beauties around for decades. Maybe five or six years ago the earth end of the chair legs had a little rot so I cut a couple of inches off them. Wow. It was great. They were more comfortable than they’d ever been. I could have done that 25 years ago. Ah well. Everything in it’s time, right?
A couple of years after that the table wasn’t working for me but the drop leaves, which essentially were semi-circles, became these nifty fold-it-up-when-you-need them tables screwed right onto the side of the shop. Sometimes you need a table outside, sometimes you don’t. Perfect.
A couple of days ago, I got out the wire brush and a scraper and started preparing these, by now ‘vintage’, chairs for yet another coat of paint. Several of the slats that make up the seat and back needed replacing on two of them. Then an arm rest started to crumble so I spent a bit of time carefully removing it despite rusty screws etc. Eventually I got it. They had had their day. I took the two rickety and rotting ones off to the dump. So, I still have two that are pretty sturdy and probably have a few years in them yet.
