Help me buy an office chair! - Update: I bought a chair!

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I need a chair for my home office nook, now that I’m doing more office-y/computer type of work from home. I’ve been using my craiglist Ikea dining chair (Lehrman!) at the desk or dining table…that is, when I get my butt off the sofa (with my lap desk of…lap). I used to have a Buy Nothing office chair that sucked (for me), so I re-gifted it.

So this is ergonomically bad.

The last time I had a designated office chair that I bought for myself for my home office was…a bunch of moves ago. It was somewhere in the $150 range and purchased new from some big box store that sells office-y things (I don’t remember which one). I vaguely remember it doing chair things adequately.

Now, I have a corner desk that is very small, and I live in a small space. So I need something with smaller profile, no arms. I rent. I’d love to make that long-term in this location. History suggests that it would be bad to bet on that. So I prefer a chair that is either easy to move OR not so pricey that I’d feel bad gifting it OR retains value to re-sell.

While normally I prefer sticking to Buy Nothing, cheap on craigslist or other thrifty options, I feel like I need to buy something meant to give me the ergonomic support I actually need. The reuse “market” is full of crap chairs that look a smidge nicer than Lehrman but don’t actually do what I need them to do.

Any recommendations? Should I just suck it up and buy that same $100-200 range of big box store chair? (Ugh!). Should I seek out a more expensive used high quality chair? Spend time sorting through used listings to find the big box store chair that doesn’t suck posted for $50 instead of $150?

Feel free to suggest specific chairs and/or other tips! Thanks!

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So this is probably not very helpful, but one of my former coworkers once bought an Eames (sp?) chair (or maybe Aeron? I can’t remember, it was a proper office desk chair though) at a fire sale (Bay Area, startup going out of business). I think it was like a $500 chair (maybe more?), but he paid way, way less, maybe $100? $200? I used his office one week when he was gone (he had a certain software I needed to use that I didn’t have and it was a good time to use it when he was gone) and the chair was the most awesome amazing office chair I have ever sat in. Worth $500? Hard to say. Worth $100 or $200? Definitely. (I’ve never been privy to or seen such a sale though, so…)

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I am a small human. I just take the arms off my office chairs - it’s usually really easy to do, just a single screw on the bottom.

I’m a Steelcase fan myself; I went to a used office furniture store (SE Portland has a while cluster of them for some reason?) and just sat in all their Steelcases and Herman Millers till I found The One. It was a couple hundred IIRC, but it’s great and will last forever.

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I found someone on CL local to me selling a 7 year old Herman Miller Embody task chair for $100.

So I now have a chair with minimal effort.

Now, I need to learn how to dial in the ergonomics. It’s already - not adjusted - light years better than Lehrman.

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