Thursday, July 10, 2025

Rubbish Rescue --> fixing a Free-Pile folding chair for good juju

I don't need a folding chair -- and in fact, I didn't keep this folding chair. But I fixed it because (a) it was easy for me to do, and (b) I figured it would bring me a bit of good Free-Pile juju.  

There's a guy down the road that has one of the most amazingly lovely free piles.  When he moved into his fixer-upper of a house two or three years ago, it was stuffed to the gills with the previous owner's accumulated stuff.  William started putting all sorts of this stuff out on the lawn at the edge of his house.  What emerged was amazing combinations of antique trash and treasures.

That corner where he lived became its own minor version of a tourist attraction for a few months, as people figured out how to make use of what they found there on the lawn, and then William replaced what had been taken with new-to-see assorted marvels.

Meanwhile, he slowly rehabbed the property.  He added a knee-high retaining wall along the boundary of his lawn, made of scavenged stones, and he did all the work himself.  I'd stop and chat as he wiped the sweat from his brow.

The house is in pretty darn good shape now, and the wall around his lawn only occasionally has goodies to sift through.  But many of the pedestrians along the street keep an eye on the property, partly out of habit and partly out of respect for his propensity to surprise us with the latest unearthed goodie.

For a couple of days, I'd pass by the folding chair he had out, not paying it particular attention because --- as I noted above --- I don't really need one.  I was surprised it didn't get snapped up, though, and so one day I looked a bit more closely and saw that the strap of one armrest had been cut or ripped.

The armrest (lower left) doesn't have a strap connecting
it to the plastic guide (upper right).

Well, I could fix that.  And I did; I brought the chair home, used my mighty little seam ripper to remove the old snippet of a strap, dug through my nylon strap pile to find a suitably sized replacement, sewed that on with a bit of quick sewing machine work, and Done.

Now the armrest attaches to the support pole.

I carried the chair right back to William's corner, where it had waited patiently for a new owner. The next day when I returned to take a photo of the whole chair, it was gone.  Success.  

I hope whoever got this chair uses it in good health and happiness.  

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