a game of musical chairs

Against all craigslist odds, our recent chair purchase was fast and problem-free. We picked up the chair Friday night in SeaTac from a young woman who has had it since she was twelve. Coincidentally, she was selling the chair because she's relocating for a job to a town in Montana that is only forty miles from where I grew up. The chair is heavily influenced by the Eames Lounge Chair, but has some subtle differences that I find particularly endearing. The back is one solid piece of bent wood instead of two, the legs are bent wood as well, while the Eames legs are all metal, and there is no tufting, which I see as a bonus because it means fewer little places to collect cracker crumbs.


We love the way it looks in our living room, and Alden loves to sit in "daddy's chair," but we have run into a few logistical problems. It's funny how acquiring one new piece can throw a wrench into the whole flow of a room. First, in order to make room for the chair, we needed to remove the two black chairs that were previously in our living room. In case you missed it before, we have a lot of chairs in our house. I'm not really willing to give any of them the boot yet, although one particular chair will probably get its marching orders as soon as we save up enough for a new couch downstairs.

Since we decided to keep the black chairs, I had to figure out a way to work them into another room. They are more like office chairs than armchairs, so it seemed fitting to move them to the office—currently the least organized and most unfinished room in the house. Moving them to the office meant moving the two dining chairs out that were being stored there. The dining chairs haven't been in the dining room because I hadn't ever managed to recover the seats to match the first four that I had done two years ago. I guess I finally got the motivation that I needed to complete that project, and we now have six matching dining chairs around our table!


Now the only problem I'm left with is that our coffee table no longer fits in the space in which it used to reside. The ottoman of the new chair sits just a few inches too close to the corner of the rectangular coffee table, creating an awkward pathway, and with my bruise-prone shins, it's an injury waiting to happen. The solution: a round coffee table has now been added to my thrift store master list.