A Few Of My Favorite Things - Part 2: Furniture Risers

This will be a short post about a short problem.  Namely, some of my furniture was shorter than I wanted it to be.

When I first moved to this apartment, I already owned a table and a couch.  I had a lot of expenses at the time, and I didn't want to buy new furniture.

I spend a lot of time at the dining room table, and that table was just a little bit lower than I needed.  The edge of the table would scrape my thighs when I rolled under.  The simple solution was to put risers under the legs.

There are products on the market that do the same job, but Gus fabricated mine.  For the table, he used pieces of 2x4 cut square.  He then cut a piece of 1/2" plywood that fit on top.  He used a hole saw to cut a circle out of the plywood that fits around the table leg.  This keeps the leg from falling off the block.  He attached the plywood to the 2x4 with some wood screws, and spray painted the whole thing black to look nice.

One table riser

This raises the table up about and inch and a half.  Exactly what I need.

The end result

The other piece of furniture that required lifting was my couch.  The problem I had with the couch was that it was very difficult to transfer off the couch back into the wheelchair.  It was just a huge step up to do that transfer, and especially when the HO was still a problem, that just wasn't easy.

We did the same thing for the couch legs, but we used 2x6 for the base, and 2 layers of 3/4" plywood on top.  The first layer is to add extra height to the couch, and the top layer has the hole cut to make sure the leg doesn't fall off.  We used a pretty large hole saw for this one.  I think it was about 2-1/2", but any size larger than the couch leg would have been fine.  We made this one wider because it was taller, and we didn't want it to be unstable.

The couch riser

This is another modification that I take for granted, but I can't imagine living here without it.