Pre-Labor Day Labor Day

The chair has been sitting on the floor without legs for a few months now, probably the entire summer. It's difficult to remember exactly how long; the house and all the things inside of it continue to fall apart at random paces, and it is impossible to keep up with them. The critical ones get immediate attention. The merely annoying are placed on the To Do list. And the To Do tasks are completed in a relatively random sequence.

After spending most of the morning emptying out the basement bedroom - which has served as an auxiliary workshop for lo, these many years now - so that it might be possible to figure out the ventilation system which must be set up down there (and that's a long story for another day) - it occurred to me that the chair had been sitting on the floor without legs for long enough; it was time to do something about it.

I had tried to do something about it a month or two ago, by the simple task of purchasing replacement legs at one of the local hardware stores. But they were not the correct type. In fact, the "correct type" didn't seem to exist. This particular chair has the screw threads for the legs embedded deep within the bottom plate, but the replacement legs have very short bolts. Apparently they assume that the base threads begin level with the surface of the mounting plate, but that is not the case.

So it was time for a little improvisation.

The skirt is about four inches high, so my first thought was that a couple of scrap 2x4 blocks in each corner would be about the right size. There are plenty of scrap 2x4s lying about the basement. Not surprising, considering all those walls that've been built down there. But how to attach them to the base plate? Screws would probably work, but there was a suspicion in my brain that they would be wobbly that way. It would be nice to take advantage of the threads that are already built-in to the base plate. Are there any bolts lying around that could be used? It wouldn't surprise me, considering how much of a pack-rat I am. Absolutely refuse to throw away anything that could possibly come to good use at some time.

Scrounging around, I was able to find a set of bolts that had been purchased for some long-forgotten project (which evidently never was completed), and, miracle of miracles, they were exactly the right size! So then it was time to take a set of 2x4 blocks and drill a hole through the middle of each and bolt them to the base plate.
The first task was to (1) find the center of the 2x4 blocks; then, (2) mark it; then, (3) drill a countersink hole and then the hole for the bolt to go through; then, (4) take the bolts and cut a slot in the top so that they could be screwed down tight into the base plate.Finally, I put the leg onto the base plate to see how it looked.

Not bad.

Now, it was time to put the second part of the stack so as to have the proper height. There weren't any more 2x4 scraps, but there were still plenty of 2x3 blocks, so I took four of those and drilled holes along the outer edges and put screws into those holes and screwed them down on top of the 2x4 blocks.

Well, it isn't quite as tall as I'd wanted, but it'll do for awhile. Now it's time to clean up all the sawdust in the garage, put way the tools, and get ready for dinner.