November 19th, 2020

Let's see, what else have I been up to lately. Hmmmm.  Well I know it isn't really exciting but I  did replace the felts on all of the chairs in the house recently.  Wow!  Yeah, I know, Life in the snooze lane right?

It was long LONG over due.  When we first bought the kitchen table and chairs and the family room set (basically the same chairs), one of the first things we did was to put those little felt roundie things on the bottom of all of the chairlegs. 

I wasn't concerned about scratching up the floors. Not really.  This house was built in 1962 and these are still the original tile floors. So they've been beaten to heck and back again.  It was the noise.  Everytime anyone would pull out a chair to sit down or stand up and push the chair back in, there would be that gawdawful screeching sound. Very nearly a fingernail-on-a-chalkboard kind of noise.  Horrendous!

So rather than avoid moving the chairs or be traumatized by that terrible sound every day, we bought a little card of the round things and put them on the chairs. Didn't take long.  It was a small package and there were just enough felts for the chairs we had. Perfect.


For about four years we enjoyed blissful silence.  Nary a sound when a chair was either pushed or pulled.  And then, about six months ago, we slowly began to notice occasionally a tiny bit of a screech again.  I don't know if the felts wear out or what but it became clear very quickly that they were no longer doing their job.

The noises continued and got slowly louder and more annoying and oddly, we stopped noticing it.    It's like that screechy sound whenever I open or close my ironing board. I'm so accustomed to it I just don't hear it anymore. But wow, anybody else who happens to be within ear shot sure does.  Or a squeaky front door. Or a small barky dog. Or a whiney toddler. Or....well you know what I mean, those little noises that at first irritate and then eventually just become sort of like white noise.

I thought Tim felt the same way aBout it, but apparently not because recently a nice fellow driving the UPS truck dropped off a package at our house that held roughly a zillion felts of all different sizes.   I didn't order it so Tim must have (or perhaps it was a neighbor whose dog was about to have a nervous breakdown over the noise)  Subtle eh?  Well I can take a hint.

So I got to work laying all of the chairs on their sides like little drunken dinosaurs.  Then I peeled off the old nasty felts and stuck on some new ones.  

And afterwards, once again, blissful silence reigns supreme as we pull out and push in the chairs.  I spent a few moments just doing that with a big stupid smile on my face. Mission accomplished!

As I was putting the kit away I noticed some paperwork in the box.  I turned out to be a set of instructions.  Which obviously I didn't look at before I started.  It was pretty straight forward and I had already applied the felts correctly. (yay me) But the thing that made me laugh was the suggestion that, even after the felts are applied, we should never push or pull the chair but only lift and place the chairs.  What's that now?  

What is the point of putting felts on the chairs if you are always going to lift and place them?  And wait a minute, let's picture this. I'm sitting at the table, enjoying my meal and the conversation. But eventually we are all finished and are, therefore, ready to stand back up.  How do I get out of the chair without pushing back first?  Hire a very strong person to lift the chair with me in it?  Or slither out the front of the chair while it's still pushed up to the table? Which would mean I would end up being underneath the table and so than I would have to....what...crawl out?  Well that is just Ridiculous.
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Nope, in this house we push and pull chairs and when I need to, I will again replace the felts.

​What an exciting Life I lead!