Repairing My Grandfather’s Chair Instead of Replacing It

My grandfather’s chair sat in my parents’ garage for six years before anyone did anything with it. It was a ladder back chair, oak, with a woven rush seat that had gone slack and gray, and every time I walked past it in the garage I told myself I would deal with it eventually. Eventually turned into the year my father asked, not unkindly, whether I actually wanted the thing or whether he should just haul it to the dump with the rest of what nobody had claimed.

I wanted it. I just had not admitted to myself how much work it would take, or how little I knew about fixing a chair that was older than my father.

Finding someone who still knows how

The rush seat was the first problem, and it was not one I could solve with wood glue and good intentions. Rush seating is a craft, and it turns out there are still people who do it, though they are not easy to find in a phone book anymore. I asked around at a woodworking supply store an hour from my house, and the man behind the counter gave me the name of a retired furniture restorer who worked out of his own garage on weekends. He was patient with my questions and did not make me feel foolish for not knowing the difference between natural rush and the fiber cord that looks similar from a few feet away. My grandfather’s chair had the real thing, hand twisted cattail leaves, which is part of why the seat had worn out in the first place. Natural materials do not last forever, and that is not a defect. It is just what they are.

He rewove the seat over the course of a month, and I paid him for his time, though the amount felt small compared to what the chair meant to me. What he would not do, and what I am grateful he refused, was strip and refinish the wood. He told me the dents and the worn patches on the arms were part of the chair’s record, and that sanding them away would make it look newer but would not make it better.

What I chose to leave alone

There is a mark on the left arm of the chair where my grandfather apparently set down a hot pan more than once, a faint scorch that has gone almost invisible with decades of oil and use rubbed over it. I could have had that sanded out along with everything else. I did not. My grandmother, when she saw the chair back in my house for the first time, put her hand right on that spot without being told where it was, the way you find a light switch in a room you have lived in for years. That told me everything I needed to know about whether the mark should stay.

I did tighten the joints, because a chair that wobbles is a chair nobody will actually sit in, and an heirloom that only gets looked at loses something important. My uncle, who does small carpentry as a hobby, came over one Saturday and showed me how to check each joint for play, how to work a little wood glue into the loose ones with a syringe rather than taking the whole chair apart, and how to clamp it overnight so the glue set without pulling anything out of square. It was not difficult once someone showed me, though I would have made a mess of it working from guesswork alone.

Using it, not just keeping it

The chair sits at the head of my kitchen table now, and I sit in it most mornings with coffee before anyone else in the house is awake. That was not really a decision so much as it just happened, the same way my grandfather apparently used that chair every morning of his own life, according to my aunt who remembers him there. I did not know that when I decided where to put it. I found out afterward, and it settled something in me to hear it.

A restorer once told me that the worst thing you can do to an old chair is nothing at all. Sitting in it, using it the way it was built to be used, is what keeps the wood and the joints alive.

I understand now why my father was ready to give up on it in the garage. A broken chair with no plan attached to it really is just clutter, and I do not blame him for losing patience with mine. What changed things was not some grand restoration. It was finding one person who knew how to fix the part I could not fix myself, learning the part I could learn, and deciding on purpose which marks of wear were damage and which ones were simply my grandfather, still present in the wood if you knew where to look.

When my own grandchildren are old enough to ask about it, I plan to tell them about the scorch mark before they even notice it themselves. Some parts of an heirloom’s story are worth handing over before anyone has to go looking.