Wheels on chairs, chairs on wheels

I grew up in a time when we carried suitcases in our hands, lugging those giant rectangular boxes by their small handles, getting intense physical workouts just from the act of walking through an airport. Wheels on luggage hadn't been invented.

When wheels did start appearing on suitcases, the effect was almost electrifying. They spread like wildfire. How could anybody not have thought of this before? Luggage had been invented; wheels had been invented; how could we not have put them together?

Segue to my dining room chairs.  We have lovely wooden floors, and we're trying to protect them a bit from the feet of my dining room chairs. I've bought little felt pads (a.k.a., "dog hair magnets"), plastic gliders (which last about seven months before breaking and exposing the nail with which they'd been attached), and I've even sewed cute little socks out of old sweaters. My sister uses tennis balls, which I love, but I haven't attempted myself.

Naked chair legs, and legs with socks.

In the classrooms across my campus, we're seeing a transition from traditional classroom chairs to chairs with wheels. Oh, my goodness, but we all love the chairs on wheels. How did we not think of this before?!?

How indeed? Probably in the same way that I'd never thought of wheels for my dining room chairs, despite putting wheels on all sorts of pirate chests and army chests around the house. Because of those projects, I happened to have been gifted (fabulous coincidence) four sets of four wheels, just waiting to be put to use.

In case you're curious about how a professional attaches chairs to wheels, you'll have to just go look somewhere else.  I googled the heck out of it, and didn't find anything that seemed to have good step-by-step instructions.  Since one of the first steps I could think of myself involves "taking a saw to the chair legs", I really wanted to see if there were pitfalls I should avoid, or successes I should emulate.  Having found neither, I plunged in anyway.  

In case you're curious about how this particular amateur attaches chairs to wheels, feast your eyes.  

Step 1:  Measure the heights of the wheels.  I used this T-square.  Wait, it's not actually called a "T-square", and I can't figure out the name of this kind of ruler.  Well, anyway, I used this thingy to measure the wheels. 

Step 2: Turn the chair upside down, and draw lines on the legs at the heights of the wheels.  

Step 3 (the really scary Point-of-No-Return step):  Saw off those ends of the legs.  This not only makes the legs shorter, but --- in the case of my particular chair legs, which are quite tapered at the bottom --- gives me a thicker portion of the leg to drill into.

Step 4:  Drill holes in the legs.  For each leg, I used the drill about four times, starting with a tiny drill bit and then widening the same hole with slightly larger drill bits.  I did this for two reasons:  the first is that it's much easier to put the hole exactly where I want it with a teensy little bit.  The second is that I feared that using a large bit right at the beginning might split the leg.  This technique seemed to work well for me. 

A bit of painter's tape on the drill bit helps
to make sure I'm drilling to the right depth.

Step 5:  Plop the wheels into the holes.   The first time I did this, the holes were a bit on the big side, so I used a dab from a glue gun to keep the wheels from falling back out.  For the rest of the chairs, I stuck with a smaller drill bit on the final round, and gently tapped the wheels in with a rubber mallet.  (Gently!  I didn't want to use so much force that I split the legs. )

See the circular saw behind the chair? 
That's what I trimmed the legs down with.

Step 6:  Sit on the chairs.  I attempted this with just one of our four chairs at first, because if this was going to ruin things, I didn't want to completely ruin them!  But the first chair worked great -- so great, that sliding the other chairs around quickly became onerous by comparison.  (We'd never thought, "whoa! This chair is hard to move!  But when one of the chairs glided along on wheels, the other chairs all started to feel like they were glued to the floor.)  So, I added the rest of the wheels on.  

The view that Prewash the Dog has of our dining room table now.  

I should add that we actually have two sets of wooden chairs.  The ones I added wheels to are the really old set, and they're not as fancy as some Amish-made chairs that we have around our other table.  We like the wheels so much that we might actually go add them to the fancy chairs, too.  Since I don't have another set of freebie wheels, and since I hate purchasing plastic, and since those chairs are much more formal, I'd probably try for metal wheels instead.

At any rate, I added the wheels to keep from scratching up the floors.   The wheels seem to be successful at that, but they also just make the chairs a lot easier to use.  Super duper! 

Chair toes, post amputation.