Old wooden furniture & soap

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

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

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

Ghost story

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

My grandmother was terribly afraid of ghosts and supernatural creatures, so perhaps that was why she declined the offer. I don’t know what happened to the table, but my grandfather and grandmother received a fine chair (without a scary history) from my great-grandfather’s father.

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

To Vilhelmina

The chair moved to Vilhelmina and the house on Volgsjövägen, and then to a small log cabin on an islet in Bielite, in the Vilhelmina mountains. The cabin served as a summer and mountain cottage, and it was alternately cold and warm there, but the chair was of very good quality and suffered no damage whatsoever from this.

Many, many years later, Grandma moved out of her cabin. It was rather “awkward” for an older lady to get out to that islet, and Grandma preferred a cottage 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 people have been sitting on it, ever since 1918, when my great-grandfather’s father put it together.

New life for old wood

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

Two rounds of soap

This chair will get another treatment, this time with soft soap that is somewhat 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-scrubbing” while having coffee and children’s sticky messes 😉, 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” from the bottle and scrub in the direction of the wood grain, never against it, as that could damage the wood if you use a sharp/coarse brush.