Tag: furniture assembly

Chair Leg Cups for Floor Protection–Hah!

Okay, Sena ordered some chair leg cups to protect our wood floors. These are for the new Parsons chairs we got recently.

The cups and how to install them over the chair legs are enough to remind some people of condoms for extraterrestrials. These people have no morals and have not developed the maturity needed to listen to Rossini’s William Tell Overture without yelling at the top of their immature lungs, “Hi Yo, Silver!”

Anyway, we struggled with these condoms, I mean these chair leg prophylactics, I mean Hi Yo, Silver!”

Where was I? Oh, the cups came with no instructions. They are made of tough silicone and one end has a soft covering to enable sliding over carpet or wood floors. The manufacturers give you extra cups because they probably know you’re going to cut them up on your table saw when you figure out it will take approximately 5 hours to install one, just one, on any dining room chair without sustaining serious injury to your fingernails or getting one on just enough only to see it snap off and ricochet off your ceiling into the kitchen garbage disposal where you can gleefully grind it up into tiny condom particles.

Sena tells me the reviews are generally positive. Apparently, people writing these reviews either have no problems installing them on their furniture legs or they are pathological liars.

It really takes two persons to get these on a chair leg, one to hold down the chair, which for reasons known only to chairs, try to run away as soon as you try to put chair leg cups on them. While one person has to press down on specific corners of the cup to press them down, the other has to pull down on the sides.

If by some miracle you get all of the cups installed on the chair legs, you then turn the chair right side up, set it on your carpet or wood floor—and immediately notice that it won’t sit level. You then wonder if the problem was that you removed all the chair leg levelers (those little screw things on the bottom of the legs). Maybe you should not have removed them. Then you try putting the leveler back on, which of course means you have to remove the cup you labored to install, and then reinstall it.

After you do that—voila! The chair still sits cockeyed with one leg shorter than all the rest. Isn’t that clever? Actually, they worked out okay after the first couple and we did have to work as a team.

I think your best bet is to buy a house with dirt floors. You’re welcome.

Parsons Chairs Our Latest Knockdown Furniture

Our old Parsons chairs are getting pretty lumpy, so we ordered some new ones. We generally buy and put together knockdown furniture to save money, although squatting on my haunches and sitting on the floor while cranking a hex head wrench makes my joints sore.

Sena was having a little anxiety about the chairs. Ordering knockdown furniture can be a daunting experience, especially because I’m one of the least handy persons on the planet.

I looked up Parsons chairs on the internet. It’s named for the Parsons School of Design in Paris, France. They were first created in the 1930s in reaction against very ornamental designs of that era. They’re plain and simple, often used as dining chairs.

When I was a skinny kid, I used to lift our dining chairs for exercise. We couldn’t afford barbells. I think of Parsons chairs as being pretty light weight, so I don’t know if the chair I used for bench pressing were Parsons—although I was definitely a lightweight.

On the other hand, these chairs are definitely heavier than the ones they’re replacing. The tough part was getting the screws lined up when fixing the seat to the chair back. I had to tip the seat slightly either to me or away from me to get the screws in. When I can screw them down easily with my fingers, I’m usually OK. Occasionally, it takes a quick crank with the wrench to get it going.

When I wasn’t interrupting myself taking pictures of my assembly of the chairs, I put one of the chairs together in about 25 minutes. For me, that’s not the record. I assembled a typical knockdown Parsons chair in 15 minutes back in March.

Sena was had high anxiety about the chairs-nervous about possibly having to return them if they were damaged or parts missing and so on. She read some of the reviews by people who got them and had bad experiences. She had high anxiety about me, in case I broke something. But things turned out OK.

More Knockdown Furniture

We got another chair—for the master bedroom closet. It’s called the Jasmine Chair. It came with all assembly hardware and other parts. This one was a 15-minute assembly job, which amazed me. However, there were sharp staples protruding from the upholstery, so you have to watch out for them.