Chairs in the wood-heated home...

[morgantruce]

I'm willing to bet that I'm not the only person who has had a problem with chairs in a wood-heated home.

Think about it. Remember that nice set of dining room chairs you bought or inherited from your Aunt? Yeah--the nice wood chairs with all the rungs intact. Do you remember what started hapenning to those chairs after spending a winter or two in your house?

If your house is anywhere as near as cozy (and dry) as mine is, all the rungs on those chairs started getting loose. Before long, you started knocking all the rungs into place each time before you sat in one of those chairs!

I've visited most of the usual remedies: trying to swell and re-glue the tenons... adding huge pans of water on the wood stove. My home is solar-powered---so I cannot spare the electricity required to run an electric humidifier. With my pans of water (and an occassional load of wet laundry hung to dry inside) the house at least remains humidified enough to avoid those nasty little sparks of static electricity every time you touch a door knob. (Anybody see the movie Office Space?)

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I've resorted to buying a few good quality office chairs---nothing to shrink and come apart on those type chairs, but they are kind of unsightly in the living room---even the very expensive ones.

I'm wanting to get a pair of "reading chairs" to put in the same room as the wood stove. I want chairs with arms--but not those huge overstuffed monstrocities that put you to sleep immediately after you plop down. Comfortable though. Most important... something that will not start falling apart after the wood stove is running for a few weeks. I'm interested in hearing all sorts of "chair success" stories as they relate to wood-heated homes.

 

[begreen]

Chairs, we don't have no chairs. Burned them all in 2007. :lol:

 

[morgantruce]

Believe me, there have been lots of times I've held various loose parts of chairs in my hands... and have been tempted to just toss them into the stove. The lower rungs in particular would make a good fit. My stove however is a Jøtul Alpha, and it's catalyst would not like the taste of varnished wood.

 

[BrotherBart]

All of our furniture moved in here with us in 1985 and all we heat with is wood. And not a piece of it has come apart yet. Including the dining room furniture that belonged to my wife's grandmother and is over a hundred years old.

Maybe you need to sit a pot of water on that stove.

 

[n3pro]

Can't say I ever noticed that problem here or at the cabin. Maybe the Value City Furniture we buy isn't so cheap as I thought?

 

[grommal]

Never had a problem with shrinkage here, either. The wood is in fine shape.

Er, let me rephrase that...

 

[fossil]

You could set the legs of the tables and chairs in shallow bowls of water...this way you'll also be protected from ants and other crawling things. But, as they learned long ago while building the Panama Canal, you'd be setting yourself up for malaria and yellow fever. Maybe a bad idea. Nevermind. %-P

 

[begreen]

Low humidity in a heated house is a fact of life. It doesn't matter the heat source, when it's 30 °F and 30% humidity outside, it's going to be desert dry 7% relative humidity inside of a 70 degree house, no matter where the heat is coming from. Have a pot on the stove, lots of plants, take lots of showers and boil a big pot of pasta water to raise the interior humidity.

 

[oldspark]

Chairs, we don't have no chairs. Burned them all in 2007. :lol:

I think that is against the code. :cheese:

 

[begreen]

Emily and Martha would surely agree, but it was the only hardwood left in the house!

 

[WoodPorn]

We too have had this issue with every wooden chair/stool in the house! I'll take it one step further and mention the Oak flooring that contracts fron November through March, sometimes I can hear the pieces creaking and popping.

Try putting a small peg (glued) through your tennons. Drill through the tennon (perpendicular) and glue the peg or dowel in, I did this a few years ago and have had few issues since.

 

[firefighterjake]

Hmmm . . . no problems here with shrinkage of the wood . . . all the furniture seems to be holding up just fine with no loose parts . . . including wooden furniture in the room with the stove . . . which includes a grandfather clock approximately 5-6 feet from the stove and an engineered wood floor which I half expected to see shrink but instead didn't notice any differences . . . we do have a steamer on top of the stove and while some folks claim these don't put out that much humidity into the air all I know is that about every other day I need to refill the pot and if I don't I can generate some wicked sparks when I slip in between the sheets at night.

 

[WoodPorn]

Hmmm . . . no problems here with shrinkage of the wood . . . all the furniture seems to be holding up just fine with no loose parts . . . including wooden furniture in the room with the stove . . . which includes a grandfather clock approximately 5-6 feet from the stove and an engineered wood floor which I half expected to see shrink but instead didn't notice any differences . . . we do have a steamer on top of the stove and while some folks claim these don't put out that much humidity into the air all I know is that about every other day I need to refill the pot and if I don't I can generate some wicked sparks when I slip in between the sheets at night.

Engineered floor will have far less movement than a traditional solid plank type, and as far as the sparks..............you may want to make sure the wife isn't grounded!

 

[firefighterjake]

Hmmm . . . no problems here with shrinkage of the wood . . . all the furniture seems to be holding up just fine with no loose parts . . . including wooden furniture in the room with the stove . . . which includes a grandfather clock approximately 5-6 feet from the stove and an engineered wood floor which I half expected to see shrink but instead didn't notice any differences . . . we do have a steamer on top of the stove and while some folks claim these don't put out that much humidity into the air all I know is that about every other day I need to refill the pot and if I don't I can generate some wicked sparks when I slip in between the sheets at night.

Engineered floor will have far less movement than a traditional solid plank type, and as far as the sparks..............you may want to make sure the wife isn't grounded!

Yeah, I realized that the engineered floor would have less movement . . . one of the three reasons I went with that type of flooring (the other two reasons being I picked it up at Mardens (discount store) for a song and since we have low ceilings the thinner flooring worked better for our needs.

Hmmm . . . never thought of attaching a grounding wire to my wife . . . somehow I think I would be better served by simply keeping the steamer filled.

 

[Battenkiller]

Low humidity in a heated house is a fact of life. It doesn't matter the heat source, when it's 30 °F and 30% humidity outside, it's going to be desert dry 7% relative humidity inside of a 70 degree house, no matter where the heat is coming from.

BG, while I agree with what you say, I believe there is a bit more to the equation. Heating methods that draw in lots of low moisture content outside air into living spaces will produce lower RH inside than will other methods. Most stove installations are inside living spaces because that it where you want the heat to be felt (I'm an oddball with a basement installation). Unless you have an OAK, dry outside air is actually being sucked into your living space by the force of your draft. This happens at a higher rate than the natural air infiltration rate in most homes. That means that more dry outside air is coming in, so the RH will be lower once it is heated to room temps. However, in a very leaky home, it might not be much different. My upstairs is pretty leaky (old, used windows installed 30 years ago), but the basement is well sealed. I have a pretty low RH upstairs because of this, even though the stove is in the basement.

As far as the furniture goes, a pan of water on the stove may be enough to prevent problems for you folks in mild climates, but here in the Northeast we can see long sub-zero stretches for week at a time. Air at -10ºF and 70% RH has tons less actual moisture than air at 30º and 30% RH. When that stuff gets drawn into my home and heated up, I can practically feel my nostrils cracking. Even a full cord of green hardwood does little to raise the interior RH in my home after a week or two. At first, the basement windows frost over, but as the wood is dried in the desert of my own making, I gradually lose the battle. I wake up to extremely cold outside temps, clear windows, and cracked lips.

The fact is that wood is always swelling and shrinking according to changes in RH no matter how well it is sealed. Well made furniture accounts for this and stays tight. Crap from China will get as rickety as Aunt Irma's hips.

 

[oldspark]

I gave up trying to fix my wifes grandmas chairs, last guy who fixed them said he used a really good glue and they would not come apart for a while, he lied, I think metal chairs are the way to go as the welds do not dry out.

 

[Dune]

West system epoxy. Take the loose furniture apart as much as possible. Wet the joints, clean up with acetone. Done deal forever.

 

[Slow1]

We haven't had any of our other furniture falling apart from dry air (yet). Kid damage, yes - we got that, but not dry air yet. Amazing how little boys can take just about anything apart isn't it? but I digress...

My favorite chair for in front of the stove? Large bean bags. So nice to plop down on in front of the fire. Now getting up again after sitting there for a while is a bit tough sometimes... Especially 2am after falling asleep in front of the stove

 

[begreen]

I'm shrinking and my joints are getting creaky too. Must be the wood burning.

 

[daleeper]

We have problems with our chairs also, even when we were heating with just the gas furnace. We installed a whole house humidifier on the furnace, but it didn't run long enough to do much good. Water pot on the stove is impossible to keep up with, and we hang wet clothes out to dry, and still have problems. We just check the chairs before setting on them.

 

[oldspark]

We have problems with our chairs also, even when we were heating with just the gas furnace. We installed a whole house humidifier on the furnace, but it didn't run long enough to do much good. Water pot on the stove is impossible to keep up with, and we hang wet clothes out to dry, and still have problems. We just check the chairs before setting on them.

Nothing funnier than having someone fall on the floor because the chair came apart.

 

[grommal]

Hmmm . . . no problems here with shrinkage of the wood . . . all the furniture seems to be holding up just fine with no loose parts . . . including wooden furniture in the room with the stove . . . which includes a grandfather clock approximately 5-6 feet from the stove and an engineered wood floor which I half expected to see shrink but instead didn't notice any differences . . . we do have a steamer on top of the stove and while some folks claim these don't put out that much humidity into the air all I know is that about every other day I need to refill the pot and if I don't I can generate some wicked sparks when I slip in between the sheets at night.

Another thing I found with the laminate-type engineered wood flooring is that it's just about fireproof. I grabbed a big super-hot coal from the fire last winter, and set it right on a spare piece of the same Pergo flooring I put in the family room (where the stove is). It just sat there and sat there, eventually making a small black mark on the surface, but that was about it. I doubt if an approved flame-resistant hearth rug would fare as well.

 

[Dakotas Dad]

Big reef aquarium in the dining room. Needs 4 gallons a day top off in the heart of winter. No dry air here.

 

[n3pro]

When I was a younger brat / smart ass that was a hobby

Nothing funnier than having someone fall on the floor because the chair came apart.

 

[DeePee]

Big reef aquarium in the dining room. Needs 4 gallons a day top off in the heart of winter. No dry air here.

+1 - During burning season my large plant tank and nano reef need make-up water every day. The insert keeps the house so warm that I'm frequently unable to run the lights due to the risk of overheating. Sadly this was a nitemare-of-a-lesson learned the hard way.