Ornae. Wasn't this supposed to be about furniture?

Sometimes you can save them. But often not.

My neighbor asked me to look at a fully upholstered dining chair with a broken leg. She’d had a set upholstered with a fabric she’d found and held onto, looking for the right chairs. The chairs she found were entirely upholstered, right down to the legs, but not bulky or overstuffed. Poking around to see if I could fix the leg I saw that internally, the chair frame was so light that there was nothing to repair.

The only way to fix the leg would have been to rip the chair apart and rebuild the whole side and back frame from scratch, then re-upholster the chair. It was part of a lovely set that had a lot of family history, but it just wasn’t good enough to warrant that much repair.

There’s a great huge can of worms here: the value of craft, the cost of third world labor, the disposability of modern artifacts, the much greater availability of new stuff over fixed stuff….

I spend a lot of time poking around that can, I’ll get back to this.