Early every morning a woman from the village walks up our lane with her magnificent dog, JJ, and chats if she sees me in the garden.
Like everyone else within a five mile radius she knows that I collect wood for the stove, and am a devil with a chainsaw.
She mentioned that she had an old pine chair in the garden. It had been there for years and had fallen to bits. Would I like it for fire wood ?
When I saw it, it was more heap than chair, and in a zillion bits. The seat was broken into five pieces, the feet had rotted off, and the whole thing was covered in green mould. It looked fairly unloved.
But it was obvious that the chair had been hand-made, and wasn't pine, but beech and elm. In spite of the mould, it was beautiful. Given its sad history, the wood was in surprisingly good condition.
It took a long time to get rid of the green, to clean up the individual pieces and get them to fit together again. The curved wood of the back had begun to straighten out, and in straightening had grown too long to fit in the original joints.
I turned some new feet, made of oak, and fitted them onto the legs after cutting off the rotten wood.
Before gluing it up, there was a lot of faffing about, dry fitting all the pieces to get solid joints. There had to be quite a bit of trial and error.
And this is how it turned out:
I stained the feet to blend in with the original wood, though in the picture they are still unfinished oak and very pale.
Maybe I should add that I did offer the chair back to the woman who handed it over as firewood, but I think she was glad to see the back of it. The chair lives happily in the house now. It's not only very solid, but extremely comfortable too. It will make great firewood eventually, but not for another 50 years or so.
No comments:
Post a Comment