"You're driving to Chappaqua for a chair that squeaks?" Nate asked on Wednesday night, when I showed him the listing. I was. The seller had posted a wooden rocking chair for $85 with three photos taken in a garage and one honest sentence: solid, needs refinishing, squeaks a little on the left.
Since we moved in, our porch has had exactly one place to sit, the weathered bench that came from my mom's old apartment. These days the bench is lined end to end with terra cotta and galvanized pots of herbs, so in practice our porch has had zero places to sit. I've been eating lunch on the top step since 2020. When I drew this year's porch plan in March, there was an empty rectangle by the screen door labeled "chair?" and Nate has been bracing for it ever since.
The $329 chairs we didn't buy
I did look at new ones first. The heavy poly lumber rockers from POLYWOOD were $329 each. I see why people like them. They don't need sanding or sealing, they won't rot, and they're heavy enough that our southwest wind won't send one sliding down the porch. If I had a bigger budget and no patience for refinishing, I'd probably own one.
But we wanted two eventually, which meant $658 plus tax, and my whole garden budget this year is $450. I also couldn't picture that smooth, even plastic next to the turned columns of a 1924 house. That part is pure taste. So I set an alert on Marketplace and waited about three weeks.
Picking it up
I drove the Forester down this morning. The chair turned out to be a hardwood rocker with a spindle back, heavier than I expected, the finish worn to bare wood on both arms where somebody's hands had rested for years. Before I handed over cash I did the checks my dad taught me for anything secondhand with joints:
- Sat in it and rocked hard for a full minute, listening.
- Pushed each arm sideways to feel for wobble where it meets the seat.
- Turned it over to look at both runners for cracks along the grain.
- Pressed a thumbnail into the bottom of each leg, where rot starts.
The squeak turned out to be one loose spindle on the left side, which a little wood glue will fix. Everything else was tight. The seller, who was clearing out her garage before a move, helped me lift it into the back and said it had been her mother's. I promised it was going to a good porch.
What refinishing cost
The hardware store run came to $31: a multipack of sandpaper in three grits, a half-pint of oil-based stain in a medium brown and a small can of exterior spar varnish, the kind made for boat trim, because this chair is going to get afternoon sun on its arms from May to October. I already had rags, a tack cloth and a cheap brush.
This afternoon I set it on a drop cloth in the driveway and sanded. The coarse paper took the old finish off the arms and seat in about an hour, the medium paper smoothed it out, and the fine paper left the wood feeling like the inside of a sweater. Mateo, who turned ten yesterday, vacuumed the dust with the shop vac, a job he volunteered for because it's loud. By four o'clock the first coat of stain was on, and the wood went from the gray of an old fence to the color of strong tea.
The varnish goes on tomorrow and again Monday, with a light sanding in between. Tomorrow is also Mother's Day, and Nate has started calling the chair my present, which is generous, considering I paid for it.
How I expect it to hold up
Our porch roof keeps the rain off, so the real enemy is sun. The southwest end gets light from late morning to sunset, and ultraviolet light breaks down a clear finish faster than water does. My plan is to keep the chair at the end of the porch nearest the screen door, where the shade arrives first in the afternoon, and to give the arms a fresh coat of varnish every spring. That's maybe twenty minutes a year.
The bench is my evidence that wood can last out there. It has never had a finish in all the years I've known it, and it has gone silver and soft at the edges, but it's still solid. If the rocker does half as well with a little care, $116 all in will have been a very good deal. I'll check the arms in September and write down what I find.
The chair stays out of the garden budget, by the way. I checked my own rules twice.
Mateo has claimed the first official sit once the varnish cures. I told him Tuesday. He set a timer on the microwave anyway.
