Completely agree with the gentleman from South Royalton. I have 5 white chairs with footrests and the round table. They lasted about 3 years - even though we painted them every summer. Each year thereafter we tried patching and wood filling to no avail. This year they are all ready to be discarded.
Will replace them with chairs from the all-weather line as have now had two of the all weather adirondack benches for several years and they are going strong.
This is my first real disappointment with LLBean. Have been a customer for well over 20 years. Unfortunately we live too far away to pack them up and see if LL Bean will stand behind them.
We live in a rustic hillside farmhouse in central Vermont. Our wood deck has a 50 mile view. All we needed was a comfortable place to sit to enjoy it. So thanks to a generous mother-in-law, we got three white Adirondack chairs. They were beautiful, and with the additional cushions we eventually bought, they were even comfortable. The first year.
We put the chairs away in a dry basement for the winter, took them out again early the next summer. As we set them up, we noted that several of the hardware parts had migrated south for the winter -- and we thought we had been careful. We also noted that there was a trace of a crack in several of the back legs (the ones that angle forward and take most of the structural stress). To be careful, we repainted the chairs with high quality exterior paint. The cracks continued to grow.
By the third summer, one of the chairs had become unusable because the crack had rendered it structurally unsound. We tried to glue it. No luck. Bolts, nuts and dowels continued to scatter themselves randomly every time a chair was moved. We took to leaving a tool box next to the chairs for ongoing maintenance. They still looked scenic.
Since the fourth summer, the chairs have been permanently "retired" to a rack in our barn. All three are cracked, unstable and useless -- someday we may load them up in our car and see if LL Bean truly honors their "no exceptions guarantee" replacement promise but then we'd be stuck with three new ones to start this frustrating process all over.
We do not have young children. We do not manhandle our furniture. We have a picnic table and benches on this same deck that have been there for 15 years, and a set of Lafuma recliners that have stood up well for nearly 10. It's the Adirondack chairs that are clearly poorly made and totally lack durability. Not just one. All three.
A word to the wise: if you have a covered patio where sun and rain will never hit your "hardy" Adirondack chairs, if you have no children, if you have space in your house to bring them inside where they will be warm and dry every night in the summer, and all Fall, Winter, and Spring long, you will benefit from a very nice decorative touch.
If you are looking for something usable and lasting and not simply a rustic ornament, look elsewhere.
While I love the quality and color of the adirondak chairs, one side of the back of both chairs was drilled too big. As a result, the screws do not tighten down. I am in a bit of a quandry about what to do for they are fully assembled and I live in a very rural area and returning them will be a pain.
