With an upholstered wraparound back that narrows into ... Attic Upholstered Dining Chair The Attic Upholstered Dining Chair's runged oak frame ... Orb Leather Dining Chair - Cement/Antique Bronze Round out your dining room in modern style ...In the realm of floor care, a lot of attention is placed on protecting floors against outside contaminants and making sure everyone in the home is aware of good floor-friendly habits. Sometimes, furniture and chair legs can get overlooked as potential sources of floor damage. Unprotected furniture and chair legs can still grind grit and debris into your floor’s finish. Greater concern for scratches and gouges comes from heavier pieces of furniture. For another added layer of hardwood floor protection, chairs and furniture legs need to be made more floor-friendly. A popular form of chair leg protection is the chair glide or furniture pad. Quite simply, these are pads made of different types of material that are put on the bottoms of your chair legs.
There are different types of chair glides, each offering different levels of cost and protection.These types of pads are very secure since they are attached to the furniture leg with either a small nail or screw. Tap-on pads use different materials to make contact with your floor, depending on your floor type. Care should be used with tap-on pads because if they are not properly installed, the nail or screw may be exposed to harm your floor.These are peel and stick pads that can be found almost everywhere. They are typically made of felt or rubber and are the least expensive. However, the adhesive on these pads won’t last as long as tap-on or slip-on pads.These pads are made to fit over a chair leg and are often made of rubber or soft plastic. These won’t have a problem of falling off like a self-adhesive pad or have the potential to scratch your floor like a broken tap-on pad. While most chair glides and furniture pads are sold as universal pads for all floor types, some consideration is needed for the floor type you have.
Common materials to make chair glides and furniture pads are felt, rubber, cork, plastic and metal. Be especially careful with chair glides since they are made to help furniture move on the floor. Choosing the wrong material with chair glides can lead to floor damage.A harder material like steel or plastic work best. Hard Floors (hardwood, ceramic tile). Felt and rubber work best. If using rubber, be weary of potential scuff marks. Make sure the felt is thick enough for even heavy furniture. Soft floors (vinyl, rubber). Felt, rubber and plastic work best. Just like foot traffic, how often your furniture moves will play a part in choosing the right type of furniture pad or chair glide. For heavy pieces of furniture that won’t be moved at all, you have a wider range of furniture pads to choose from. Thick pieces of felt or rubber work well with heavy furniture. In dining rooms or kitchens, you will have high furniture traffic, so choosing a felt pad can be a good option.
Plastic pads or glides will wear down over time, so be sure to check the life of your chair glides periodically. Depending on your kitchen floor, rubber might need to be avoided for scuff marks. In family rooms with couches and sofas, consider how hard the furniture will be treated. Will kids jump on the couch, or will you plop down in your favorite chair after a long day of work? These types of actions will cause small movements, so choose your furniture pad wisely. A rubber pad can do well in this scenario since it will help to restrict furniture movement. While chair glides and furniture pads can be purchased at your local home improvement store, other options are available if you want to minimize cost and make your own. Here are some DIY solutions that can help if you have these materials lying around. For all of these options, a hot glue gun is a great way to make sure that these materials won’t slip or fall off your furniture.Old scraps of carpet can be cut and placed on furniture legs.
Make sure these pads are installed with the carpet-side touching the floor.While felt furniture pads can be store-bought, any thick felt will do nicely. Cut the felt into the appropriate size and glue on.If you have industrial grade Velcro, use the soft side of the Velcro (looped side) as an effective furniture pad.Old towels can be cut into pads, making sure they are of appropriate thickness.Tennis balls that are slightly cut open can make good DIY slip-on pads if you don’t mind how they look on your floors.Leather is another soft, durable material that can be made into a good furniture pad. Regardless of which type of pad you buy or make, make sure that your furniture is level on the floor. If it’s not, it can scratch the finish or make gouges on your floors. Also, be sure to maintain a good cleaning routine to make sure your floors are clean and dirt-free. No matter how durable your furniture pads are, they won’t protect properly if your floors are dirty. For more tips on how to clean your floors properly, be sure to read our cleaning guides.
Also, we provide strong hardwood floor finishes and cleaners that will help make your floors beautiful and well protected. Find the best cleaners and finishes that meet your needs.Pascal Ribreau made his own standing chair with the help of a friend. This is the story of three chefs and how an auto accident, a fallen tree and a carjacking forced them to figure out how their love of food meshed with spinal cord injury. If we told you they clawed their way back into the kitchen and white hat to the delight and praise of eaters everywhere, that would be a nice fairy tale, but it wouldn’t quite be true. What is true is that none of them gave up the devotion to the culinary arts that was stamped in their DNA. They’re just pursuing it in different ways. when a car accident paralyzed chef Pascal Ribreau. At 30, Ribreau, a French transplant, was already a minor cooking celebrity. He was famous for his rabbit ravioli at a Montreal restaurant called Allumette and for his apprenticeship with chef Joël Robuchon at Les Roches, near St. Tropez.
With his passion for food, it wasn’t a question of if but how and when he would return to the kitchen. After three years of rehab and a lot of hard work, Ribreau still had a following and, soon, financial backers to open the restaurant of his dreams. Around the same time, in Philadelphia, Rob Hodge was about to come to a crossroads in his culinary career. Hodge had been working in restaurant kitchens since he was 14 and he’d earned an associate’s degree from what’s now called Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts, in Pittsburgh. At 29, he was moving up the ranks at nearby Lino’s Restaurant when he was carjacked and pushed off a bridge. After three months’ hospitalization, the new paraplegic was eager to get back in the kitchen but not sure how, or even if he could. “That was my profession before my spinal cord injury, and I didn’t want to change careers. I love food,” he says. Rob Hodge can use much of the equipment in his restaurant’s kitchen from his regular chair and has learned from experience what is too dangerous to try.“
I call them battle scars of the kitchen!” The final chapter of our story starts four years later and about 500 miles away in New York. In the five years since earning her bachelor’s in culinary nutrition from Johnson & Wales University, Natalia Mendez had been cooking in several restaurants throughout the city. Then a tree fell on her car, leaving her quadriplegic. The accident didn’t change Mendez’s passion for food, but it did force her to consider new career paths to indulge it. Natalia Mendez poses with celebrity chef Wylie Dufresne. Mendez is buildinga career in food writing. Ribreau’s dreams came to life in 2002 when he opened Célestin, a high-end French restaurant in Toronto. He served as head chef and co-owner and set out to convince colleagues and the public that a chef could cook fine cuisine from a chair. Instead of focusing on making the kitchen accessible, Ribreau enlisted the help of friends to design a customized standing wheelchair. With a narrow footprint, a stable base, and an upper-body support belt, the result allowed Ribreau to thrive in his kitchen with minor architectural modifications.
“We did not have to move pots and pans to lower shelves, and when I am standing I don’t have a lap to spill things on,” he quips. “I did not modify the kitchen so much as modify how I work within it.” The restaurant was a success. “At first, there was some media attention about the novelty of the chef in the wheelchair,” he says. “But it was a top restaurant for seven years, so that means people didn’t just keep coming because of the novelty.” While Ribreau’s dreams were coming true, Mendez was reconfiguring hers. Without the upper-body muscles or finger dexterity to execute much of the needed work, she quickly decided she would not return to the professional kitchen. Still, she wasn’t about to give up on her lifetime love. The question for Mendez became what to do with her talent and love for food. “I definitely was not detaching myself from the culinary world,” she says. “It’s a part of me and I couldn’t stop if I tried.” As Ribreau and Mendez took divergent paths, Hodge started a path he knew all too well.
But before his former employers would give him his job back, they made him prove himself again. “They knew I could cook, but they wanted to see how well I could execute now that I was in a wheelchair,” he says. They made him cook for them in one of their other restaurants. He hadn’t lost his touch. Soon he was installed at a new restaurant, Ambrosia Fine Dining, an upscale eatery in Johnstown, Pa., where he remains today as head chef. To be sure, a few modifications were required. First, Hodge managed to secure a standing wheelchair through voc rehab. Then, his employers made sure the kitchen was nearly double the usual width and the walk-in refrigerator was ramped. “We measured everything so I could navigate easily and safely, which was perfect for me because most kitchens aren’t made for wheelchairs,” he stresses. After seven successful years and many industry accolades — Ribreau’s dream turned into a nightmare. He had an aneurysm and mini-stroke and had to leave Célestin.
Three years later, Ribreau is planning his next return to the kitchen. Mostly recovered, he looks back on losing Célestin as a new beginning. In March he’s off to France to scout locations for a TV documentary and book about food. Ribreau would like to have his own restaurant again someday, but until then, he enjoys cooking at home. “At home I do not stand. I have an oven at the right height and a smooth stovetop so I don’t catch my sleeve in the grills,” he says. Hodge’s return to the kitchen also hit a bump when his new standing wheelchair broke after just six months. With no help from insurance and insufficient finances to repair the chair, Hodge did what most SCI survivors do: he adapted. Instead of cooking standing up, he started cooking out of his regular Quickie power chair. “It is a bit more of a challenge. I can’t reach things that are up high as easily, but I can take a broom handle and pull pans off high shelves and things like that.
And there are always people around who are happy to help,” he says. Having his kitchen set up for easy access helps, but he still struggles with tasks like putting food on the service window and lifting hot and heavy dishes. “I have a couple of burns on my legs from when I tried to do it myself,” he says. “I call them my battle scars of the kitchen!” Now 38, Hodge’s long-term goal is to open a soup and sandwich shop — “a small place where people can come and feel at home,” he says. “I know as I get older my body won’t be able to take on too much, so I keep it simple. But make sure everything is in good taste and of high quality.” While Ribreau and Hodge jockey to remain in the kitchen, Mendez is rechanneling her passion for food into a career as a food writer. She studies the health effects of different foods and blogs about healthy recipes and natural ingredients. She would like to do more writing about food, possibly cookbooks or restaurant reviews.