Dining chair envy

December 26, 2019 5:46 AM

Do you own dining room chairs that are indestructible yet comfy enough for a day of telecommuting? Tell me about them! What qualities should I use to evaluate new-used chairs for purchase?

For the past 8 years I have owned a set of Craigslisted 1970s Singaporean-Scandinavian knock-off chairs that are mostly comfy but increasingly wobbly despite repeated screw tightening. I like that they are padded (seat and back separately), but the upholstery needs replacing, so I’ve been surfing Craigslist before I decide to tackle that potentially doomed DIY project. Do you own dining chairs that will last the rest of your lifetime? Are they also chairs that you could sit on for 8 hours? If they are upholstered, would they withstand children (and a cat who insists on sitting at the table with us)? What are the keys to a magic combination?

I want to buy used but don’t want to sit awkwardly in a bunch of strangers’ houses if I can help it - please help me narrow down my search!

posted by Maarika to Home & Garden (8 answers total)

Best answer: I don't have any brand recommendations, but you need to be sure they fit your body. The seat height needs to match the exact height of your legs and feet below the knee. Too high and you will over extend your toes, too short and you will shorten your leg ligaments. So do try out any chair before you buy and make sure that they are the right height for your table and for your body.

Upholstered dining chairs do not last nearly as well as plain hardwood. The upholstery will get nasty and wear out. Plain hardwood will probably eventually need re-gluing from people wriggling in them and loosening the joints but that happens to the upholstered chairs too, and they have the additional stress points to come apart where the upholstery is joined to the wood. It's much easier to replace cushions than it is to re-upholster chairs.

Inspect any chairs you buy for cracked rungs, signs of amateur repair and wriggly joints. A repaired rung does not mean it's a bad chair as a gormless twelve-year-old is more than capable of standing on one as if it were a ladder, and a good mend will keep the chair solid and secure for another two-hundred-years, but if the legs widen in any direction when weight is put on the chair, you can be sure it will keep doing that, and will do it more until the rungs pop out and down you go.

If I were going to do some serious chair shopping I would take a look at what styles were available prior to 1930 and see if I could get some sturdy cheap kitchen or dining room chairs from that era - anything that has survived since then is likely to have been well constructed and not used in a bar room fight, and because mass production started in the 1800's, there are hundreds of thousands of them still around so they are inexpensive. I wouldn't go with mid-century modern as those ones were designed for looks more than durability and tend not to have rungs which are important for long term structural stability. Mid century modern is also at the stage where the wood is probably wearing loose in the joints, so a mid-century may need to be dismantled and re-glued. There will be a lot of really flimsy chairs from the fifties and later still around that only survived because they stood around a table unused, or only sat upon my a little old lady who only ate in the dining room on Sundays, but once you start using them their life expectancy will be in months or weeks, not years or decades.

Finally every chair should be subjected to the jacket test. Take off a good solid jacket and hang it on the back of the chair. Then test it for stability. Some chairs that have solid backs are fundamentally unstable. They are fine if you are sitting on them, but the back is too big for the chair and the centre of gravity when no one is sitting on the chair is too high which means that they can be knocked over by a very minor force. I have good solid chairs in my kitchen, inherited from my mother in law that will go over with a crash if you hang two tea-towels on them and then brush past them on your way to the fridge.
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:37 AM on December 26, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: Dining room chairs are not designed for this. Move an office chair into the dining room for this type of situation. Save yourself the pain.
posted by oceanjesse at 7:04 AM on December 26, 2019 [14 favorites]

increasingly wobbly despite repeated screw tightening.

Sounds like they would benefit from reconditioning the screw holes. If you can remove the screws completely, separate the screwed pieces, and fill in the holes with wood filler, then drill a small pilot hole before re-attaching with the screws -- it could fix this problem.
posted by amtho at 8:20 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

I've been using Ikea Stefan (with a Justina chair pad) in exactly the same situation. I doubt they'd last a lifetime, but at that price point, I don't care. I only used them for 6 months of telecommuting though. Ymmv.
posted by gakiko at 9:27 AM on December 26, 2019

Response by poster: Follow-up question: are there office chairs that won’t destroy the hardwood floor in my dining room and are easy to move once a week? I assume they’d have to be wheel-less.
posted by Maarika at 10:06 AM on December 26, 2019

You can get special wheels for hardwood floors.
posted by gakiko at 11:36 AM on December 26, 2019 [2 favorites]

You can also get chair mats that work for non-carpeted flooring if you want extra insurance; they just lack the gripper studs that the models designed for carpet have.
posted by Aleyn at 1:12 AM on December 27, 2019

Response by poster: Thanks, Metafilter! We got snazzy dining chairs from some billionaire neighbors on Nextdoor.com AND a used Knoll Life office chair from an office furniture liquidator on Craigslist. I read some angry reviews about rollerblade office chair wheel failures and decided instead to go with flat “bell casters” + felt pads. I am living my best chair life right now.

Note to future caster searchers: the internet lies! You probably won’t be able to pop off the old casters with your bare hands. Use a pry bar.
posted by Maarika at 1:27 PM on January 13, 2020