Assemble Carefully

We had some old kitchen barstools from the 1980s. They were here when we moved into our house. They were big, bulky, heavy and in very poor condition. For 15 years, I tried making these barstools work. But they were squeaky and wobbly. I had to turn them over and tighten the screws that held them together every few days. The stools had big wicker backrests that our cat used as scratching posts until I put double-sided sticky tape on the wicker. The cat left them alone, but the tape made the stools look even worse.