I received some more photos of Eriez stoves today. Thank you! To see all the photos click here to go to my Eriez Photo page.

Please send in photos of your Eriez stove. They’ll be added to the Eriez Stoves Photo page.

I have two Limbert Rocking Chairs that I bought more than 20 years ago from my sister who was having a moving sale back in California.  I didn’t know they were Limberts and I didn’t even know who or what Limbert was at the time.  I knew they were old, a little beat up and oak.  I bought them for $6 each which is what my brother-in-law had on the sale label.  I thought they were crazy selling them.  They belonged to my brother-in-law’s grandparents from back in the early 1900s.  At least if I bought them they would stay in the family.

Years later I saw a chair almost like mine in an antique store and the clerk pointed out that it had a hot-iron brand under the arm showing it was a Limbert chair.  I checked mine when I got home and they also had the same brand under the arm.

At some point mine had been reupholstered and no longer had leather seats.  The faux leather has ripped over the years but the chairs were still usable. I fell in love with these chairs and they have moved everytime I moved.  I had to refinish one because of damage to the finish during a move (I know it hurt the value but I’m never selling them.)

Today as I was dusting the furniture the duster snagged on the seat of the chair.  NOOOOOoooooooo!!  The spring has broken on the chair and poked through.
You can use chairs that have upholstery damage but you can’t use the chair with a spring sticking up to catch on your clothes or skin.  The seats on these chairs have to fit perfectly inside the framework of the chair.  I don’t believe I’ll be able to fix a spring.  I can reupholster regular chairs but maybe not something specialized like these.

Now I have to see what it would cost to reupholster and fix something like this.  Leather is out of our price range right now so maybe some kind of needle-point tapestry-like material would be nice.  Maybe even faux leather again.  Just really disappointed that this happened because I love sitting in the chair and the timing is bad with Christmas right around the corner. Maybe there is a book or video out there that can show me how to do it.  Who knows, maybe I’ll learn how to fix springs and find my calling. If anyone has reupholstered something like this, please comment on the difficulty of fixing the springs.

I posted about my Eriez Stove a few years ago in my personal blog. I couldn’t find much about it and I had people emailing me asking me how much I thought their stoves were worth. I had no idea! I wondered the same thing about mine.

I’m making a page in the sidebar for Eriez Stoves and I hope anyone searching the web will stumble upon it and provide their photos and information regarding Eriez Stoves.

Mine came down through the family. I loved it in front of the fireplace but with our new configuration of the furniture, that spot is reserved for the flat-screen TV (when we do get one some day.) I moved it in front of the window in the dining room and will most likely put a potted fern on top of it. Even though there isn’t a great place to put it right now, I love the stove and am going to keep it.
This is what my Eriez stove looks like. (Continued after photo.)

Mine is a gas heating stove. It had been converted to have a red electric light inside to look like it was operating. I have since removed that so I can put candles in it. From the research I’ve done it seems Eriez Stoves sold mostly cooking ranges in the later years. They sold their buildings to the Marx toy company in 1936. I have an account with newspaperarchive.com and have found some sketches of some Eriez stoves in some old ads but really no information. If you have an Eriez stove, range or radiator and wouldn’t mind sharing a photo, please email me and I’ll post it on the Eriez Stoves page. Any additional information would be nice, too. I can’t advertise it for sale or give you an appraisal. I just want to have a central place to compare photos but can give contact information for those providing photos if they want.

Here are a few links to information regarding the Eriez Stove Manufacturing in Erie. I’m guessing any Eriez stove would have been made prior to the date of sale, 1936, to the Marx company. However, I read somewhere that they had opened a base of operations or warehouse in the Los Angeles area at some point so I don’t know if that kept operating or not.

http://cgi.ebay.com/1933-Eriez-Gas-Range-Stove-folder-Erie-PA-/390168307003
pamphlet showing Eriez gas ranges (an ebay item, the link may not be good for long.) Scroll down towards the bottom to see the photos.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/1801770.pdf
an application for patent on a new model of Eriez stove 1931.

http://www.marxmuseum.com/home/marxhistory.html
1936 Eriez Stove Co. buildings bought by Marx.

The storm windows are completed. I scraped and painted them then gave them a topcoat of a product that has worked really well with my outdoors projects. I used it on my bird feeders and bird house and they were outside for 3 years in summer humidity and winter freezing rain and snow and they look the same as when I put them out (except where the squirrel chewed it.) The windows just need to be put up and then I’ll weather strip them in place for the winter. They came out a bit shiny (really shiny) but I think they will look fine outside. If not, I’ll take some 0000 steel wool and knock some of the shine off.

___________
More photos below.
I feel lucky to have a work place set up in my basement where I can be out of the cold and watch TV.

I set my chairs up on my lowest work table and removed, cleaned and glued the rungs and set them in clamps overnight.

The two (out of 7) dining room chairs that I’m refinishing are now stripped down really good. It was a very big job. Every time you turn it over you see another side or cranny that didn’t get completed. I started on these chairs many years ago and gave up. They were my second ever refinishing job and I didn’t know what I was doing back then. Not that I’m an expert now but all those gouges and scratches from the metal scraper wouldn’t happen today. I couldn’t get all the old finish off back then. I still had a hard time using one of the strongest strippers out there. I think the finish that wouldn’t come off was actually a tinted wood filler that they left on like a skim coat back in the craftsman era to get it that mission color. Sanding didn’t work because of all the rungs and crannies on the chair and the sander just didn’t fit into the spaces. I tried hand sanding it but that was going really slow so I took out the stripper.

Even with my heavy-duty gloves and glasses I managed to get chemical burns from it. Don’t scratch your nose. That stuff burns instantly when it touches your skin. My best result came with using the stripper and then carefully taking a curved card scraper to remove it. I use an old planter and a brush to apply it, no matter what you use, stripping is a messy, awful job.

Two days work and I got the two chairs stripped really well. I will still have to clean the residue from the stripper off and then lightly sand any marks or raised grain. Then the fun part starts. I like adding the new finish.

The leather seats look awful right now and some some mildew on them from being stored in the basement for so many years. I’m hoping some leather restoring product will make them look good enough to use for now.

I want to keep the original 100-year old leather on these two chairs if possible.

Wallpaper should come right off using the special products (like DIF) out there today.  I used them, I serrated the wallpaper with that round gizmo.  I sprayed it, soaked it and when that didn’t work, I made my own product from recipes I found on the internet , some including fabric softener.  There was no getting around it.  I had to chip it away, layer by layer.  What in the world did they use for wallpaper paste?  I think maybe it was real glue, like hide glue, or maybe even the glue you make using flour.  It wasn’t affected by the products meant to remove the wallpaper of today.  I ended up gouging a lot of my real plaster walls.  But I did get it off eventually. I saved the layers I could just for posterity’s sake. I didn’t  know about the wallpaper steamers, perhaps that would have helped to rent one of those. If you have every had to remove wallpaper you will know what it is like and then times it by 5 or 6 times with the different layers.

I scanned the remnants of the wallpaper on my flatbed scanner as you can see below.  The color isn’t really right.  I’m missing two of the layers but they are somewhere in this house hiding in a save-forever box… somewhere.  The Greek key pattern is more blue.  I didn’t like the look of the Greek key at all.  I wonder how anyone could live with such a busy pattern.  I don’t care for the last one either as the pattern was so BIG.  I have done a little bit of research on the different patterns of wallpaper and tried to date the ones I had on the wall.  See photos by clicking “read the rest of this entry.” Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a few more items that we found behind our mantel in our 1917 house when we removed the mantel to refinish it and repair the wall.
These rulers are probably 70 to 80 years old. This is my guess from the age of the women that lived in our house all their lives until we bought it. They were about elementary age in the 20s and high school in the 30s. We also found some of their homework behind the mantel. I love the color of the aged wood. The wood is embossed with the metric marks and numbers on the middle ruler which is pretty neat and gives it an old-fashioned, quality look when you see it with a raking light. Doesn’t it bring back memories of your old school days long ago? At least two of these rulers were made by well-known pencil companies with long, interesting histories.