Wedding gifts worth sitting down for

MAURICE, Iowa (AP) — No bridal registry in the world could match the gifts Michael and Bryce Vander Stelt and their respective brides-to-be will receive when they wed this winter.

The brothers’ grandfather, John Vander Stelt Jr., is making a sofa for each couple. It’s a legacy gift, but not a surprise.

The grandsons and their fiancees each picked out their own fabric, and the men drop by Grandpa’s workshop from time to time to watch him work on their gifts.

Vander Stelt, 74, a “sort of” retired second-generation upholsterer, still works out of his John & Son Upholstery shop on Main Street here.

His workshop is cluttered with specialty sewing machines, workbenches, swatch books and tall rolls of fabrics that, forgotten in a corner, bear witness to the once-bustling shop’s earlier days.

“I did it all,” Vander Stelt recalled of his career. “I did automotive, boats, airplanes.” But when he started the wedding sofas, it had been 15 or 20 years since he had built a piece from scratch.

“For years I had those measurements in my head. They all came back, so far.”

Building the two sofas was not Vander Stelt’s idea. The couches will be a gift from the grooms’ parents, Audrey and Mike Vander Stelt, also of Maurice. It was Audrey who asked her father-in-law to build them. After all, he built a sofa as a wedding gift for Mike and her 26 years ago. They still have it and have changed the fabric only once.

“I thought it would be just a nice gift to remember their grandpa by and a great thing to give them,” Audrey said. “I really thought it would be a lot harder to convince him to do it.”

First, she asked the boys if they’d like to have Grandpa make one for them. They said they would.

“It’s something made with his hands, his craft,” said Michael, 24. “He’s been doing it for 60 years. It’s built like a rock. It’s just really cool, something my fiancee (Laura Rensink) and I can hold onto and pass down to the grandkids and say, ‘It’s something your great-grandfather built.’”

Bryce, 21, and his fiancee, Erin Brogan, are equally pleased. “It’s the idea of having something from him that we can have for a long time,” Bryce said. “Especially to start out with, something that nice is good.”

Both are students at Northwestern College in nearby Orange City and will move their sofa into Bryce’s apartment after their Dec. 19 wedding.

For now, the sofas are a work in progress. Each sits on its own card table-sized platform attached to an old barber chair base so it can be raised, lowered and swiveled as needed, a Vander Stelt innovation far superior to sawhorses. Vander Stelt had to go to a Steen, Minn., sawmill to find the 1.25-inch lumber to form the frames, now held together at six-inch intervals by wood screws. The padding is thick and already covers about half of each frame.

Vander Stelt will hand-turn 4-by-4-inch lengths of oak he found among his old supplies to make the sofas’ legs.

The sofas’ styles are not identical, but Vander Stelt’s craftsmanship is meticulous on both. After all, he said, he learned from the best, his father, John Vander Stelt Sr.