Furniture Upgrade: Office Chair

Hot on the heels of my recent PC build, it was becoming increasingly obvious that my office chair was on its last legs.

For months, if not years, I had been putting up with the failing state of the chair. First this was the wheels being bad at rolling. Then it was the vinyl upholstery flaking off, which covered everything that touched the chair with little black flakes that seemed to propagate like an open bag of glitter. To cope with this, I desperately leaned on my redneck upbringing and turned to duct tape. This solved the flaking and I could deal with the ugly look of the thing. But this respite was brief. Next came the failure of the duct tape itself which began to roll up at the edges becoming even worse than the flakes as the tape’s glue would stick to whatever touched it. This would result in either the painful pulling of leg hair or getting sticky residue on every piece of skin or clothing that touched it. Sometimes both.

Understandably, this situation wouldn’t stand, or sit as it were. So, it was finally time to bite the bullet and get a new chair.

We started by looking at a number of stores but didn’t find anything that seemed like the right fit, especially when it came to price. That is, until we happened to go to Ikea to get something else entirely, but if I have time and am going to Ikea anyway, of course I’m going to take a stroll through the showroom for fun. While working my way toward the kitchenware section, we happened to stumble through the office furniture. Since we were there we started looking at and testing out chairs. Most weren’t a good fit. The ones that were comfortable were not a good fit style-wise or were too expensive but we finally found one that was tucked away from the others that was on sale for a good price and was comfortable so we were sold.

The only real downside to the chair we went with was that the arms were powder coated a bright red (probably to make it look more gamer). This could be easily remedied however, so we bought the chair regardless.

Once it was home and assembled, I got to the task of removing the red arms it came with. One of the nice things with powder coating is that, under the right conditions, you can get different powders to stick to one another once they are hot which means I would be able to heat up the red arms and coat them with a different color.

My work had some textured black powder available so I quickly heated up the red arms and gave them a subtle coating of black. Just enough to cover the red but not enough to clump or make the coating look thick. Next it was just a matter of reattaching the arms to the new chair and, boom, chair upgrade complete.

Not only an upgrade from the previous one, but a customization as well to make it fit the home even better. Ultimately, it’s a small change but the effect it has had on the enjoyment of my home has been surprisingly drastic. I don’t think I realized before how much I avoided working in the office because of how uncomfortable the old chair was. Not to mention keeping it behind closed doors when guests came over to avoid the embarrassing sight. Now I’m doubly proud of how the chair looks because I had a hand in this outcome. It’s one of the best parts of being a maker. When you make or customize something, you get an immense rush of pride whenever you see it. Not bad for a chair that was on sale at Ikea.