Dad's Chair

Like my thread in the instrument repair forum, I have a few other "family heirlooms" I am the temporary caretaker off.

One of those is another of my Dad's personal items ... his chair.

In reality it is nothing more than a very old wooden chair.

What made the chair unique is that it resided at our kitchen table, and it was the only chair my dad ever sat in when at the kitchen table.  All the other chairs were of more modern (at the time) design with padded seats and backs, etc.

Dad had this old wooden chair because of his unique way of sitting.  Dad sat in the chair with his feet on the seat of the chair, squatted down with knees up at his chest.  This was a position Dad found to be completely natural to him.  Outside, if he was just sitting around talking to friends or taking a break from a task, this was how he sat on the ground.

Because of this unique sitting style, the old wooden chair developed a wear pattern.   From my earliest recollections I only remember the chair as being painted white.  That white paint always showed the white paint worn off to bare wood where Dad's feet were positioned on the chair.

My Dad died in 1988 and Mom remained in the house until the early 90s.  At a point in time Mom came to live with me here in Las Vegas.  Her house was sold to my cousin Troy.  Troy bought the house with many of the possessions from our family still there.  When Mom left and the house was sold some things were taken out, but quite a bit remained.  One of the things that remained was Dad's chair.

The old chair was somewhat lost in the fog of the past but did come to mind for me on occasion.  Sometime in the late 2000s Queenie and I went up to the old hometown to visit and check things out.  We found Troy there at the house (he lives there) and caught up a bit on the past.  I hadn't seen Troy in decades by then.  The mention of Dad's chair came up and Troy offered it to me.  I was surprised that after all the years Dad's chair was still around. Even Troy having grown up in the same town and actually on the same block knew the significance of Dad's chair.  Troy realized the chair belonged in the correct branch of the family.  

Queenie and I brought the chair to Las Vegas where it assumed a spot in our bedroom for all the years since.

The chair has some problems.  Troy had repainted the chair (white of course) which concealed all the foot wear-pattern my Dad had put into the paint for all those prior years.  the chair has a giant crack through the center of the seat, a severely cracked rung below the seat and a few other minor issues.  Structurally though from the seat down the chair is solid as ever.

When I got the chair home I immediately wanted to "restore" the foot wear-pattern to the seat.  I started stripping the seat and was then sidetracked by life and left it.

This is how I left the chair. (it was a start, I suppose) 

The Chair by Larry Madsen, on Flickr

Now with the Violin project pretty much behind me I had found second wind on the chair.

I've done quite a bit of additional stripping.  believe it or not I found the easiest and least messy way of stripping these many layers of paint off was to simply scrape it off with a razor blade.

The most severe problem with the chair is the mentioned crack through the center of the seat.

It seems to me... if I don't solve this structural problem we eventually won't have a chair.

Dad's chair crack 1 by Larry Madsen, on Flickr

I'll get the paint stripping completed then decide how to deal with the crack.  I have a couple of thoughts on how to approach it, but as of this moment, I'm still undecided.