21st Century Furniture

I am probably not looking in the right places...  Or using enough brains.  It's the twenty-first century, for crying out loud, we should by now have office chairs with proper supporting arms which also will permit you to put the chair under the freaking desk.

I know.  I'm not looking in the right spots.  I've got limited space in my "home office," so I'm looking for a way to use the space wisely.  Oh, and protect my delicate tushie from the frequent long periods of sitting it has to endure with the rest of me abusing it.  

Yeah, I know, you didn't need that mental picture either.  What is somewhat aggravating for me is that, about a decade ago, now, I plonked down around $120 to pick up the chair I am seated in right now.  But let's take another moment.

Back about 33 years ago now, I moved out of my parent's house.  I brought what limited furniture I could fit into my Ford Tempo 4-door vehicle, and wedge into my girlfriend's apartment.  Mind you, I had a chair from my grandmother's kitchen table set.  It was one of those rather futuristic sort from the 1950s that sported shiny metal legs and frame, and some snazzy red vinyl covers.  Or in other words, yeah, it was, well, like that.  I watch a lot of those home-improvement shows, and hear the phrase "mid-century modern".  Mind you, I'm a bit past that point myself, but it does tend to create chills in me when I hear it.

Mostly because I fear burnt orange, avocado green, thick shag carpeting, colors that can be a mite louder than a Van Halen Concert (look it up, kids), and lapels that threaten bell-bottoms for fabric abuse.  Yeah, I went there.  I never had the ultra-cool bell-bottoms so wide you could hear them ring, but I did, to my ... well, let's just stop at everlasting fashion shame, have a pair of red-white-and-blue-PLAID-bell-bottom pants.  In my defense, it was right around the Bicentennial, and oh, they were acceptable as school pants.  I went to a Catholic Elementary School where the boys had to wear blue pants, and light blue button-down shirts.  Or, well, that was the officially-stated school uniform.  I never once saw any of my schoolmates sent home for uniform violations.  By the time I had reached the double-digit age range, the acceptable "it'll pass" uniform was "a shirt which contained some patch of blue-ish colored material, and pants, preferably not faded jeans."

You think that's funny.  To this day I do not own a light blue button down shirt, because my friends, just looking at the damned things cause me to immediately sweat and worry how far away the principal's office is.  Yeah, it's been... well, I can say we're getting close to 50 years since I had to worry about such a thing (close meaning it's closer to 50 years than it is 20 years.  Ahem).  

But getting back to my mid-century design-phobia - I lived through many of those kitchens.  Fortunately, I only lived in two of them, but many relative and friend kitchens were ... well, let us just say afflicted by some sadist's particular idea of "this or vomit-colored".  Yup.

Back to the office furniture issue.  I started out with a dinner chair for my "desk chair".  And after a few years I built ... or more properly "cobbled together" a set of arms which did somewhat attach to the chair I could use for my desk.  They worked well enough, until I moved out of the house, so that went the sad way.  And then, the two rather nicest pieces of furniture I ever built myself were destroyed by chimpanzees with tools.  That is, my sisters decided to destroy my furniture so one of them could move into my room.  Talk about a "oh, hey, get out, if this doesn't work, we don't care, you're officially homeless if this blows up in your face."  Good thing I had fallen in love with my best friend, whom I still get to see regularly today.  And most of those sisters are thankfully out of my life.  Can't really repress that glee, but hey, yeah, furniture.

After moving out of my parents house, I still had "tool privileges" at that place.  That is, I was allowed to come back, build things, and ... well, make more furniture I needed.  When my by-then-wife and I, and our two cats, chose to move into a real grown-up-ish apartment, with a second bedroom, I contemplated, and decided, to build myself a desk.  Now, in this complete and utter vacuum of knowledge, I cobbled together what turned out to be a pretty damned good idea.

I started with inexpensive materials.  Because that's the way I roll.  As in, if it worked out the way I had hoped it would, perhaps I would eventually need to re-design and re-build it out of better-looking, more permanent, prettier materials.  But the original job was done with 2x4s and 3/4" plywood.  Or, if I was building it today, it'd be around $200 in material.  

Because wood is now damned expensive.  As I note to my wife every few weeks, I am so sorry for picking a hobby that turned out to be a heck of a lot more expensive than I ever thought it would be.  Or to put it another way, back when I built this desk, a 2x4 was around a dollar apiece.  A full sheet of 3/4" reasonably-acceptable plywood was running around $27.  And I was pretty careful with my material.

I built two frames out of 2x4s that are mirror images of one another.  If you think of a capital letter L, you will get the idea.  The back portion of the desk, the upright part of the L, is built out of 2x4s which are a foot apart.  That is, from the rear edge of the back 2x4 to the front edge of the front 2x4, it's exactly 12 inches.  And they stand 66" or five and a half feet tall.  They form the back, shelving portion of the desk.  

In front of them, there are two more 2x4s which stick out.  They go from the back of the back 2x4, forward 42 inches.  Not because of Douglas Adams, but because that's three and one half feet - or about the amount of space I felt would be adequate to allow me to set a desktop computer, with a monitor on top of it, and in front of the computer, a keyboard and a mouse.  And rest my forearms on the desk top for support.  

Or in other words, I designed a desk so that my chair wouldn't need to have arms.

That's right, I went there.  The two side frames are mirror images to one another,  At the very front edge, the upper and lower legs of that bottom portion of the L are joined by upright 2x4s which support the front edge of the desk.  And the desk top is exactly 29" above the floor.  Or is, that is, 29" above the floor when that frame is topped with a 3/4" thick piece of wood.  Those two side frames are, presently, joined with a number of 2x4s that are just short of 48" long.  

Why "just short"?  Because I want the frame to be wide enough that I can take an off-the-shelf piece of plywood which is 48 inches wide and set it on the frames with those cross-braces there, and use it as a desk.  So right now, if you look from the bottom, there is one 2x4 running across the back, on the floor, to keep the back frames steady.  Above that, at the back, about the middle, and at the very front edge, are more supports.  

Which is where things get a little weirder.  The two braces running across under the desktop are 2x4s that are "standing up" - that is, the 1 1/2" wide part is under the desk, the 3 1/2" part is facing me when I sit at the desk, because when turned that way, the 2x4 carries much more weight without flexing or deforming.  Which is kind of the point of a desk - you don't want it bouncing around when you're trying to type.  

The very front brace of the desk is actually a 2x6 - which is 2 inches wider than a 2x4, at 5 1/2" wide.  It's still 1 1/2" thick.  But that front-desk edge support is laying flat - that is, where the other two braces are 3 1/2" tall, the front one is only 1 1/2" tall.  Why?  Because It gives enough support laying flat, and I can push my current work chair under the desk - when the little arms are retracted and the braces I added are removed.

Uh, what's that?  Yeah.  I spent about $90 two years ago because the chairs we had available to use for my work-from-home setup weren't working.  

I suppose I should explain a little bit more.

About 25 years ago, a good friend of mine stumbled onto a used office furniture, going out of business, free to a good home, get it out of here before we burn it sort of sale.  I don't recall who was doing the going out of business thing, but he managed to happen across some well-used office furniture in excellent condition. 

And if you, like me, are a connoisseur of chairs, you will note that there are several forms of chair seats.  The chair my mother and I refinished, since the vinyl was showing it's old age, worked well for me when we finished.  I started with a section of 3/4" plywood that had been cut and rather obsessively sanded, filed, chiseled, and otherwise modified to exactly fit the metal frame, after which it was covered by a 2" layer of foam and a layer of denim.  The denim was adequate to stand up to my hind parts, and the plywood protected by the foam was comfortable enough for short-duration sitting. 

 As it soon became obvious that my computer obsession would continue to grow and I would spend many hours staring at this thing, it became urgent to find a better chair.  Which is where I started to study them.  And learned that most productivity-style office furniture comes in three basic styles.

The first is as I had done - a flat hunk of wood with some minimal concession to comfort.  The wood might be slightly or moderately shaped to conform to a person's hind parts.  Or it might just be flat.  But then there were the type two chairs.  They were most often some sturdy form of reinforced plastic, often with several inches of heavy padding, allegedly, and rather laughingly referred to as "all day chairs."  Yeah, maybe for some of you who do not carry around as much extra ballast as I do,  But when you have some genuine fear of not exactly heights, but the damage you would likely experience if you reached a rather sudden stop as most falling objects are wont to do when they run out of altitude, well, lucky you.  

But I got a lot of weight on my ass.  So that's why I look for "type 3" chairs.  If you're sitting down, at home, and comfortable, bounce up and down a bit on your chair.  You may note that the pillowy cushion below you seems to have substantial give in it.  That's probably because there's no solid surface under you until you hit the floor.  What is, however, below you is probably a system of metal springs, supported by fabric and significant padding, and you'll note it's just bloody comfortable.

This is what my friend had stumbled across in his accidental encounter with the "all gotta go" furniture sale.  The chairs he found were a generous width, had tall backs so tall you could lean your head back when you relaxed.  The arms were wide, padded, and supportive at the right height.  Unfortunately, though, the arms also rendered the ability for you to slide that chair under the desk as an impossibility.  

Now, these chairs were likely 1960s or 1970s construction, which was pretty impressive and still holding together well when he encountered them in the early-mid 1990s.  And for $20 he sold me one of them.  And the broad base with the four smallish wheels on large, beefy legs worked pretty well.  Until I kept pounding my butt into the seat.  Eventually, one of those legs - made from walnut, I know, I cried too - cracked, and I had to reinforce/rebuild/support it.  As I had two small children at the time and did not have a huge amount of excessive income to blow in various bogey, caster, or other assorted wheels, so I supported it in the easiest way I could.  I found a chunk of vinyl fabric left over from another project, and wrapped it rather tightly around a stack of 2x4 and plywood to give me a level base that didn't dig into the carpet, but slid reasonably well.

And the day we moved out of that apartment, into our temporarily own home, my wife directed me to throw out that chair, my Thom McCann boots, and several other items which I still regret.  But we'll stick to chairs.

When, after a few years in that house, I found myself with a real work-from-home job, I decided to invest in a decent chair to permit me to do just that, comfortably.  And I found a local used-office-furniture shop which had a selection of scratch-and-dent-and-experienced furniture that might fit the bill.  

This chair I'm sitting in now was likely in the $700 range when it was sold originally.  I picked it up for $120, brought it home, and it did OK for a while.  Then one of the wheels broke apart, and I started top despair about the likely inevitable approaching end, until my son found - about eight years ago now - a replacement set of wheels at the local big-box home improvement shop.  So we tried them, and it turned out their small posts fit exactly into the sockets on the base of this chair, and there were five of them - sockets and wheels - that worked.  

So it gained a second life.  The problem with this chair is that the arms of this chair are not all that supportive, and it's a bit wider than the hallway between my work desk and my home desk.  So back when the whole pandemic thing started, and my employer offered us a small budget - about $100 - to improve our home work stations, I plonked mine down on a "gamer's chair" which turned out to be almost adequate.  

My work chair now sports three "long-hall trucker cushions" for the protection and muffling of my butt parts, and the arms now have a collection of ... well, more "ergonomics on the cheap" which I engineered up.  They're a length of 2x3 which has 3/4" plywood sides about 14" long by 4" tall.  They're attached to the 2x3 at the top, and fit rather tightly on either side of the existing arm cushion.  On top of the 2x3 is some additional framing, topped by a piece of PVC pipe cut in half the long way.  That is, it forms a sort of a trough.  On top of the trough are a couple of arm cushion pads I tried to see if I could bring the arms of the chair up high enough.  They failed in that regard, but they do form an effective armrest when placed into those troughs.  

And they're removable, as well.  So that works.  And at the end of my work day, I stand up, stiffly, from the chair, remove the arm rests I built, then lower the chair arms down to the bottom, which permits the chair to slide beneath the desk.  The two arm supports go on the chair seat, and wait until I put them back on the arms tomorrow.

What I would really like to engineer is some sort of armrest that might fold down out of the way and yet be usable for a workday.  But that's going to take more brain power than I have available right now.