Furniture

2011 ArtPrize Entry - Cherry log mortised bench, carve formed

Uniberp made this a while back. Its on permanent loan to and displayed in the lobby of Spectrum Theatre at GRCC.

Folding Table

I leaned against this table a few weeks ago and half of the screws holding the steel reinforcing rail to the top popped out. This happened once before and I replaced all the screws with larger ones. This time I decided to replace the screws with flat head machine screws. This required some long range planning. I wasn't going to make a special trip to Home Depot to buy a handful of screws, so I had to wait for another, bigger project came along, and one did. A couple of weeks later, younger son wanted to replace a couple of sheets of drywall in his house and I got drafted. I picked up the screws when we went to Home Depot to get the drywall. Double bonus, I got him to pay for them.

Osmany helped me replace the screws. Well, he did the work on the table, I did the fetch and carry. This required countersinking the holes in the top, but the surface is hardly pristine so that didn't matter. The trick is to get the countersink the right depth. Osmany did a creditable job by futzing with the first hole until he was satisfied and then marking the countersink with a Sharpie so he could better judge how deep it was. Worked very well and now the table is stronger than ever.

Standard procedure in modern America would be to buy a new table and throw the old one out. Problem is the new tables are plastic, you can't get tables with particle board tops anymore. Getting rid of the old one would either mean an expensive trip to the dump or taking it apart (not too difficult with an electric screwdriver) and then cutting up the large pieces so they would fit in the trash and / or recycling. I suppose the top could go in the composting bin once it was cut up into bite size chunks. Probably would have taken as much time and effort, though less skill.

Printer Table

Osmany put this table together from scrap lumber a few months ago. The printer had been sitting on the floor for months and it just grated on me. It shouldn't be on the floor. Fancy machines shouldn't be sitting on the floor, someone might kick it. We won't talk about how dust accumulates at floor level.

Dining Table

The girls have decided to remodel the house and the first order of business is getting rid of old furniture. They placed an ad for this table and chairs and someone came and bought the chairs. Paid full price but didn't want the table, so now we need to find a new home for it. We might send it to a furniture reseller in Beaverton. That would be the simplest solution.

My mother-in-law, god rest her soul, paid around a thousand dollars for the table and six chairs shortly after we got married thirty odd years ago. With the way inflation has been going I expect a similar table would cost around five grand today, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Dining room sets can be had for around $1,000. Deutsch Furniture Gallery offers a similar style table, made of solid wood, for around two grand. The top on our table, fancy as it looks, is made of particle board with a veneer skin.

Decrepit office chair

A week or so ago, younger son hired a dumpster to get rid of a bunch of junk, so we hauled some odds and ends over the hill to take advantage of his benevolence. I got rid of my old office chair and replaced it with my wife's old office chair. It suffers from the same leaking pneumatic cylinder problem, so I stole the block from my old chair and installed on the new-ish one.