Old wooden furniture & soap

My great-grandfather was named Bernard Norman and was a tailor in Junsele, Västernorrland.

He was a handy and handsome man who unfortunately, due to his poor kidneys (and possibly also because of his frequent consumption of pannikak), left his wife and children at just 36 years of age. It was sad, but unfortunately there was not much that could be done about poor kidney function in those days!

Bernard lay in state on his own tailor’s table, while the people of Junsele passed by to pay their respects. That was not at all unusual in those days either.

The Ghost Chest

My grandmother was later offered the fine tailor’s table, but she did not think it was suitable as a dining table, given the history it actually had!

My grandmother was terribly afraid of ghosts and supernatural beings, so perhaps that was why she declined the offer. I do not know what became of the table, but my grandparents received a fine chair (without a frightening history) from my great-grandfather.

Bernard had made the chair himself, entirely out of wood … there is not a single nail or screw in it. Fine craftsmanship!

To Vilhelmina

The chair was moved to Vilhelmina and the house on Volgsjövägen, and then to a small timber hut on an islet in Bielite, in the Vilhelmina Mountains. The hut served as a summer and mountain cabin, where it was sometimes cold and sometimes warm, but the chair was of very good quality and did not suffer the slightest damage from this.

Many, many years later, my grandmother moved out of her hut. It was rather “awkward” for an elderly woman to get out to that islet, and she preferred a cabin with a road all the way to the door.

The chair came with her from the islet and ended up this time in Siksjönäs, where we are now based. It has stood here and been sat on ever since 1918, when my great-grandfather put it together.

New Life for Old Wood

Of course, it had been wiped down and cleaned from time to time, but yesterday it received a thorough treatment with root brush and soap, possibly for the first time since 1918?!
I scrubbed it with lukewarm water and Soapa. 

Two Soap Treatments

This chair will receive another treatment, this time with solid soap which is slightly fattier than the liquid soap. This gives it even better protection and a re-greased, saturated surface that repels dirt.

Instead of a large scrubbing brush, I used a mini root brush,actually a vegetable brush, but it works very well for smaller jobs like this. This brush is very coarse and is not suitable for fine lacquered furniture, but here we are talking about 98 years of “bottom-worn” coffee breaks and sticky little fingers 😉 so a root brush is perfectly fine on rough wood with a lot of deeply embedded dirt.

Use a moderate amount of water, a few “pumps” of the bottle and scrub in the direction of the wood grain, never against it, as you can damage the wood if you use a sharp or coarse brush.