Chairs. Jason's Nemesis.

This is a public service announcement.  If you’re one of those people who leans back on your chair, so that it’s on its two back legs.  Break the habit.  Seriously.  Your mom will thank me.  Businesses and school custodians will thank you.  Chairs all over the world will thank you.

We have about 250 chairs in our Events Center.  Every winter, we spend several weeks repairing them to make sure they’re sturdy.

The whole process begins with sorting chairs.  We make several different stacks of chairs.  One set of chairs are sturdy, but their cushions need cleaned.

Another set of chairs are sturdy, but require the seat cover to be completely repaired.

Yet another set includes chairs that need repair.  Glue, screws tightened.  Remove gum stuck to underside of chair. General maintenance.  You get the picture.

Before we got busy with reupholstering, we had our annual Resolve Party.  That’s when we break out the Resolve to wash away all those stains.

Jason and Theresa spent several days scrubbing on the seat cushions to see what they could clean up with a little elbow grease.

Theresa even had to break out the big guns by using some baking powder to see if it’d bring out the stains.

Sadly, even that effort wouldn’t get them all clean.  It did leave a big baking powder mess.

Although they put forth a valiant effort, we determined that we needed to completely recover about half of our chairs.  Key Jason’s sad face.  (This is after I said, “Look happy!”)

We had a large numbers of chairs this year that needed the cushions to be completely reupholstered.  This was depressing since it might be the job that my brother hates the most at the golf course.  Keep in mind, he often does some pretty horrible jobs, so that’s a good indicator of how much he hates chair duty.  He and Theresa recovered all of them about five years ago, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise that the job needed to be done.  Again.  They have thousands of people sit on them each year, so they are bound to get dirty.

Jason got to work pulling all of the staples out of the backs of the seat cushions.

He has a mathematical brain, so he timed himself and determined that he averaged about five minutes per cushion to completely remove all of the staples.  Then, while he was working, he counted up how long five minutes times 87 chairs would manage to take him.  Too long.  That was his conclusion.  No worries, though.  Our super hero has forged on and is officially a staple removing mad man.