Every chair has its application at home, school, work, or elsewhere. Because of this, you cannot use all the chairs interchangeably unless you convert them. An office chair helps maintain a healthy sitting posture, which prevents side effects from sitting for too long at work.
Notwithstanding, you can also transform a regular chair into an office one toget the same comfy feeling an office chair offers.
Below are the steps on how to convert normal chair to office chair:
- Make your Seat Comfy
- Adjust Seat Height
- Create a Footrest
- Enhance Lumbar Support
- Choose to sit Wisely
This article sums up the steps to converting a normal chair to an office chair such that the turned office chair bears the same comfort as the real office chair.
Five Steps To Convert Normal Chair To Office Chair
As a worker in an office, you are very much aware of what sitting for a very long time can cause to your back, legs, and entire body. It fills your joints, buttocks, and other body parts with pain, sometimes making you stiff because you didn’t take any walks.
An ideal office chair allows you to uphold a healthy posture and offers a little comfort, preventing strain injuries. It can also prevent possible injuries such as carpal tunnel disorder and others. Therefore, converting a normal chair to an office one should be such that the end product exhibits matching characteristics with a typical office chair.
Regardless, you can modify your normal chair to an office in less than an hour, with far less budget than a typical chair. That said, you will need a soft roll of towel paper, a towel or an empty-liter soda bottle, books, and tape.
The necessary steps to convert a normal chair to an office chair include the following:
1. Make Your Seat Comfy
If your regular seat is as hard as concrete, I bet you it’s not close to an office chair. You can’t sit on it to work all day long without feeling pains in your butt, back, and legs. An office chair should at least provide a cushion for buttock support unless you don’t have problems working with numb buttocks.
However, it’s not a bed, so you should not expect anything too comfy. Therefore, you can use a pillow or towel instead of the plastic mesh weave of a typical office chair.
2. Adjust Seat Height
If your elbows go below your desk, your seat is too low. You will have to stretch to reach almost everything on your workspace, such as your keyboard, phone, etc. However, stretching to reach your desk will cause shoulder pain and carpal tunnel as time goes on.
On the other hand, you may assume a slouching position or have an unhealthy posture from working for too long. You will also have back pain because your feet won’t sit on the floor either. No matter what your regular chair looks like, it needs to be at the right height. Your arms should bend at the elbows at a 90-degree angle when you reach the required height.
So make your elbows level with your workspace by placing your arms and forearms on your desk. If your elbows are not on the same level as your table, raise or lower your chair until they are even. If your chair is too low and you can’t think of any way of raising it or making it any higher, always place a pillow or towel on the seat.
Sit on the pillow or a carefully folded towel; it lifts you at least and raises you such that your elbows can be level with your desk. But if the chair is too high, even though we hope it’s not, you will need a higher desk or replace your seat legs.
3. Create a Footrest
Now that your chair is at the required height, check your feet. If they can’t touch firmly on, provide something to make them rest on. Your feet should always sit flat on the ground, but use a small box or footrest if they aren’t; when you do that, your legs stop dangling over your seat’s edge all day.
Putting a footrest under your legs will reduce stress on the shoulders and neck.
4. Enhance Lumbar Support
Lumbar support is essential in protecting you from back pains when you sit for quite a long time. It maintains the inborn curvy position of your spine. Therefore a typical office chair should provide proper back support; it will raise or lower the chair’s backrest or inflate a lumbar bladder.
Regardless, you can give yourself lumbar support by sitting properly. You have to sit up straight, leaning slightly back while your feet are firmly on the floor or the footrest of your chair. But if there’s a massive gap between your back and the chair, get your paper towel roll tucked behind your lower back.
I recommend you use the roll of towel paper to remove the rolls to fit perfectly; then, you can tape it to the chair. Let it stick to the chair, so it doesn’t lose. Aside from the towel paper roll, you can also use an empty bottle of Soda.
Again, positioning the keyboard afar from you will compel you to lean forward, which is a bad posture that creates back fatigue. So always keep the keyboard near the edge of the desk.
5. Choose to Sit Wisely
Of course, even a typical office chair can still be useless if you do not sit properly. So, you should always enable yourself to sit wisely. You might want to cross your legs, but do not do it; because when you cross your legs, it puts stress on both your back and neck.
Ensure to place both feet on your footrest or floor.
Final Thoughts
At any instant, you can transform a regular chair into an office chair. Because your normal chair lacks comfort, you need to work with it. You make the conversion possible by making your normal chair comfier, adjusting the height, creating a footrest, and enhancing lumbar support.
All that is left is for you to sit wisely. Well, I hope that you found the help you were looking for in this article and you’ve been able to convert your normal chair to an office chair.
