Silencing screechy chair feet

People are irritable and I know why. It's not the looming cost of school supplies, or even the approach of another season of bad reality television.

No, it's this; We all smelled a tinge of winter in the air last week, a crisp, clear nip in the evening. Personally, I wasn't prepared for my reaction. I threw myself face down and pounded the ground, screaming, "NO, PLEASE, NO!" Good thing it was dark in that intersection, or I might have embarrassed myself.

However, friends don't let friends lie in an intersection at night wearing black. Even when you insist that it's your "Snowbird on a Budget" strategy for guaranteeing that you won't have to deal with winter anymore.

Out of a Scrape

A hint of approaching winter causes human survival instincts to kick in, and that sharpens all the senses. Weak sunlight bores into your brain like an Internet virus with a taste for sarcasm. People wearing too much cologne broadcast their unconscious territorial issues and make you long for a spear and a clear shot. Mattresses squeak more loudly. Cabbage tastes worse, if that's possible.

So this is a good time of year to reduce your sensory annoyances. My favourite obsession is silencing the chairs that scrape across our wood floors whenever someone gets up or down from the dining room table, which happens 80 or 90 times a meal.

(Let me just explain that in our household there is a lot of wear on the chair feet, since there is usually someone IN the chair as it is being dragged: either a kid with short legs or an older person who isn't as cocky about vaulting up and down as you or I might be. So the chair is lugged rather than simply pulled.)

Rad Pads

There are several scrape-minimizing options and I've tried them all. Felt pads are the most obvious solution, but the adhesive fails sooner or later and the pads start slipping off the feet, leaving a trail of gummy residue every time you move the chair.

Then there are small metal discs bearing a perky tuft of carpet. To install these units, you hammer the attached spike into the chair foot. They last a fairly long time and work okay until the carpet gets squashed and then you're dragging the bare metal around removing the floor's finish as you go.

The very latest solution is a sliding pad impregnated with a Teflon-like substance. "Magic Sliders" appeared on the market years ago in a stick-on version. They made it incredibly easy to move even heavy objects (up to 3200 pounds) across all kinds of floor surfaces. Unfortunately the adhesive was lame, so the little pads sometimes pulled off in mid-haul.

Now the same manufacturer has introduced a new two-part Magic Slider. You nail the base onto the chair foot, and then snap the Teflon-like pad solidly onto the base unit. The chair slides like crazy. You can achieve speeds so high you won't need a car anymore.

The cost for Magic Slider pads is higher ($4/chair) than either the felt or carpeted discs, but with the new installation design, they should last a lot longer.

Pre-Hole Punch

If your chair feet already have holes from a previous carpet-disc installation, you'll need to mix up a small dab of 5-minute epoxy. Give it three or four minutes, until the epoxy is starting to get firm. (It's not essential to wait, but it'll be way less drippy.)

Insert the nail through the base unit, then twirl the end of the nail in the hardening epoxy. Ram the nail into the existing hole and leave it to set. When the mixed up dab of leftover epoxy is hard as a rock, you know the stuff in the hole has cured too. That's the time to snap the other half of the Magic Slider assembly into position.

Turn the chair over, sit down, and push yourself silently around the dining room at velocities only a stunt chair racer could equal. If that doesn't improve your mood, good luck with the rest of your senses.