chairs on walls

We have a lot of chairs.

We have a lot of chairs because I love having twenty people in my home for Thanksgiving, and sometime for other events.  I don't usually quite get to twenty, but I often get close, and I always kinda wish I got all the way, so I want to be ready for twenty people eating a big meal in my home. 

Also, because my favorite stores ( ="yard sales") often sell wooden chairs for cheap, and because everyone prefers sitting on wooden chairs to folding chairs, I have a lot of wooden kitchen chairs.  In my former home -- the one that had a gazillion rooms and roughly the equivalent in children to fill it up -- we could stash the chairs all over the place.  We had enough for a dining room chair in pretty much everyone's bedroom, plus a few chairs in the basement by the TV, and a few more chairs in the living room, and of course a complete complement of chairs in the dining room itself. 

Then we moved to this new home:  a home with a smaller dining room, many fewer rooms overall, and of course no children who need chairs in their bedrooms that they don't have here.  Ergo, the chairs are pretty much all in the (small) dining room and (larger) living room.  And even though we use these spaces a lot, mostly we don't use the chairs a lot.  Instead, they mostly serve as impromptu side tables or as highly effective obstacles to vacuum cleaners. 

On the other hand, what this new house lacks in horizontal space, it makes up for in vertical space.   We have lovely, 9-foot ceilings throughout the first floor, which gives us all sorts of room to store things above our heads.   Ever since I was young, I was taken by the Shaker tradition of hanging chairs on walls between meals, and I've wanted to hang our chairs on wall for, I dunno, a few decades now. 

Shaker chairs, hanging on a wall
from travel50stateswithkids.com

One of the big reasons I haven't done it yet is because the kinds of chairs you see above are different from mine in an important way.  For those Shaker chairs, the chair back posts and the chair legs are all one post; not so with my (many) chairs.  If we hung one of our chairs from the back, the whole thing would fall apart.   This I know both theoretically (I've worked with wood enough to know how glued joints can come apart) and also empirically (my sons and husband have been rough on our chairs over the years, and we've definitely had considerable experience re-gluing chair backs back into place). 

But I think I came up with a nice solution.  Behold! 

My chairs, hung high on the wall

If that photo doesn't look like a solution to you, it's because that picture is upside down, taken from the point of view of the chairs themselves.  But if you were to walk into my dining room in the normal way (with your feet on the floor), this is what you'd see:

Two of my dining room chairs hung upside down,
with the door to my question-mark shaped kitchen to the left.

I used the kind of shelf brackets that have hooks for a clothes bar -- two per chair.  These hold the chairs on a support bar that seems to be well positioned to hold the weight of the chair without coming undone.  This seems to work really well.

Because of our high ceilings, the chairs are out of the way (and won't need as much dusting when we take them down at Thanksgiving or whenever, because of being upside down).   I almost want to use these as shelves, and put stuff up there on the seats. 

The hanging chairs actually seem to add in a neat way to this almost gothic decor of our dining room.  Here's a broader view.

Nice, eh?   It tickles me.