Old wooden furniture & soap
Great-grandfather's name was Bernard Norman and he was a tailor in Junsele, Västernorrland.
He was a handy and stylish man who, unfortunately, due to his bad kidneys (and possibly also due to frequent pancake eating) left his wife and children at the age of only 36. It was sad, but there wasn't much to do about bad kidneys at that time!
Bernard lay on his "lit de parade" on his own tailor's table, and the people of Junsele passed by and said goodbye, which was not at all uncommon at that time either.
Bernard Norman, tailor from Junsele
Ghost scare
My grandmother was later offered the fine tailor's table, but she didn't think it was at all suitable as a dining table given its history!
My grandmother was terribly afraid of ghosts and supernatural beings, so maybe that's why she turned down the offer. I don't know what happened to the table, but my grandfather and grandmother got a nice chair (without a scary history) after great-grandfather.
Bernard had made the chair himself, entirely of wood... there isn't a single nail or screw in it. Fine craftsmanship!
To Vilhelmina
The chair moved to Vilhelmina and the house on Volgsjövägen, and then to a small storehouse on an islet in Bielite, in the Vilhelmina mountains. The storehouse served as a summer and mountain cabin, and it was sometimes cold and sometimes warm there, but the chair was of very good quality and didn't suffer the slightest damage from this.
Many, many years later, my grandmother moved out of her storehouse; it was quite "cumbersome" for an older lady to get out to that islet, and my grandmother preferred a cabin with a road all the way to it.
The chair came along from the islet and ended up this time in Siksjönäs (where we are now located). It has been here, and people have been sitting on it since 1918, when great-grandfather cobbled it together.
New life for old wood
Of course, it has been wiped down and cleaned up from time to time, but yesterday it got a thorough going-over with a root brush and soap, possibly for the first time since 1918?!
Below you can see what it looked like from the beginning, how I scrubbed it with lukewarm water and Västerbottenssåpa. How dirt and "greyness" are drawn out of the material, and what the result is afterward when the wood has dried.
Two rounds of soap
This chair will get another round, and then with solid soap, which is a bit fattier than the liquid soap. In this way, it gets even better protection and a re-greased, saturated surface that repels dirt.
As you can see, the chair became clean, it got a completely new luster and surface, and if you could feel it, you would feel that the surface feels warm and soft. Wood benefits from fatty soap!
Instead of a large panel brush, I used a mini-root brush here, actually a root 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 "butt-rubbing" coffee drinking and toddler mess 😉 so a root brush is perfectly fine on coarser wood with a lot of deeply ingrained dirt.
Enough water, a few "pumps" of the bottle, and then scrub in the direction of the wood grain, never against, as that can damage the wood if you use a sharp/coarse brush.
-
The chair as it looked from the beginning
-
Lukewarm water, soap, Västerbottenssåpa and a root brush from Iris Hantverk make dirt come up from the wood.
-
This is how the old chair looked when it was finished scrubbing with a root brush and Västerbottenssåpa
-
The chair dries and becomes increasingly lighter
-
Old wooden chair from Junsele, Västernorrland treated with Västerbottenssåpa
-
Great-grandfather carved 1918 under the chair.