A Different Cane Design

 This nice set of Danish style arm chairs needed a new caning job.  But not the style you most often see.  The most popular style of caning has two vertical, two horizontal, and two diagonal strands forming an octagonal opening.   The design originally used on these chairs had just 4 strands,  two horizontal and two vertical, they were spaced such a way that little rectangular openings were formed.    Generally, whatever style of cane comes off the chair, we want to put back on, as we did here.  I think it turned out pretty neat looking, what do you think?

 Cane fibers naturally start out in the very pale color you see to the left.  They darken over time and become a nice mellow light brown.  It is most preferable to allow the cane to go through this aging process as you will then be able to keep the interesting slight variations in color that cane has.  But if you are re-doing one of a set then you have a problem.  You would have say, 5 chairs that had aged, and 1 chair that had new cane.  So in that case we are able to apply a colored finish to the cane to get it as close as possible to the rest of your set.  That is what we did below to achieve that color.  There is a risk involved in this process though.  The underside of the cane will then dry out at a different rate from the top of the cane which could cause it to crack at a later time.

So a decision would have to me made,  would you prefer the cane to age naturally, and have a longer life,  or would you prefer the chair to match the rest of your set right away, but not last as long?  Tell me what you think, I am curious what my readers would choose!

Modern VS. Vintage, The Great Furniture Debate.

 We have had two different jobs come in this week that make me feel sad for the modern furniture buyer.  I am not talking about Ikea.  That is in a class all to itself.  I am talking about walking into one of these beautiful furniture galleries with the pretty 'living room' areas and 'bedroom' areas, where everything looks like it should be in a magazine or movie.  What a poor un-suspecting buyer does not know is that underneath that pretty exterior, the furniture is actually junk.  This was proved by both the  jobs I am showing in today's blog.  The first one we had come in was a roll top desk.  The Tambour Unit (the actual roll top piece)  had some loose slats and the customer wanted them glued back onto the cloth.  So in an effort to get an appropriate estimate for the customer we took the tambour unit off of the Desk.  What we found was that the glue was so weak on the cloth, that without the desk holding the wood in place, the wood strips fell,  I repeat FELL, right off of the canvas backing!  The glue that was used on this desk was so cheep it couldn't perform it's sole purpose, that of holding things together.

The second item of furniture we had come in that demonstrates the sad level of 'fine furniture' these days is a bed rail to a queen bed.  It belongs to a young couple, perhaps  mid to late twenties.  The bed rail is made of a very unfortunate material.  It is one of the cheapest plywoods out there, it should actually be called 'plyfiberboard'  to be more accurate.  The wood is shredding as you can see in the picture below.  It will continue to shred for the duration of it's use.  Above you can see the repair we did to try and salvage the end of the bed rail.   But you can see the wood chipping away at the top.  It is likely that the wood will continue to deteriorate at such a rate that the customer could be in here every few years to get various parts fixed when the fall apart.   

Again, this modern made furniture makes me so sad for anyone who is purchasing furniture today.  How  would a 20something couple know that when they walk into a furniture gallery that they might not be getting something that will actually last?  They probably thought they were doing a good thing by shopping for 'real' furniture, not at Ikea.  They wouldn't know to find out what kind of wood the bed rails  were made out of, or that some kinds of plywood are better than others.  And would the person who purchased the Roll top desk know to ask what kind of glue was used to attach the slats to the Tabour cloth?  Probably not.  If you walked into a Furniture Gallery, would you expect that you are getting a quality piece of furniture?  Of course you would.  Unfortunately nowadays most often woods used are from fast growing trees, which tends to be much weaker and easily broken.  Or they are not even wood at all, they are made out of MDF or Plywood MDF.  They often have bad gluing practices, or use screws instead of glue which weakens the wood further.  The finishes tend to be very hard but also very thin and almost impossible to repair once scratched.

My best advice?  Buy old furniture.  You will get such better value for your money.  Old furniture has stood the test of time, so you know it is going to last.  Older furniture can be repaired more easily if it does break, but it is also built so much better, that it is less likely to break.  Take an adventure to an Antique store and outfit your house with furniture you find.  Brows estate sales and bring home some interesting treasure that will last and last and last.  Check out an Auction, you never know what bargain priced piece of history you will be able to bring home.   But if you absolutely must buy a modern made piece of furniture, keep our business card handy because we will be ready to fix it for you.

Gorgeous Veneer hiding under Paint

A very large bedroom set came into us for work recently.  It had a carefully done antiqued white paint over the entire set, and the customer wanted us to strip that off.  So we did.  And to our surprise we found something stunning underneath.  It makes us wonder who would ever have wanted to cover this up in the first place?!?

This is what we found underneath all that paint.  Beautiful, intricate veneer.  This will be so beautiful once stained.  I would opt for this to show any day, over even the best paint job.  The drawers you see in the first picture all have a design that matches the one shown in this second picture. Beautiful! 

A few of the drawers have what looks like a 'book and butt' match style of veneer work.  They are beautifully done, but it is also interesting to me that the original craftsman did not do a true 'book and butt' match, but just sort of a nod to that style.  If it was truly done in this style, then the center diamond's 4 corners would have matched perfectly.  I am curious why he went for this interesting un-even diamond instead of a perfect diamond.  By looking at this drawer, you can certainly tell that this was done carefully by hand, not en-mass as furniture nowadays is made.  What do you think? Do you like the uneven diamond?  Do you think it adds character, or does it detract?  I want to hear your opinion!

Building new work areas

For years we have had the same storage area in our shop which has been growing more and more challenging for us to use.  We had been storing Upholstery supplies which was just a waste of space as we don't upholster anything in house anymore.  We also had quite a bit of Weaving materials in those shelves.  But the weaver has moved to a completely different area of the shop.  

 We needed a space to store our field service equipment, but the shelving unit was configured very badly for that purpose.  So over our christmas holiday we dismantled the old shelving, which you can see partially in progress in the first picture.
 Then came the interesting task of planing and assembling a new storage system designed with our field service equipment in mind.

We moved the storage area to a different (and previously under-used) part of the shop and got to work.  The new shelving unit we just finished late last week and we like it better already.  It is compact, everything has it's place and it is easy to access by the men coming in and out.

Now we have a large area that was occupied by the old storage system that we get to re-purpose.  It is going to be turned into a great workspace. We are hoping to outfit this new space with all kinds of wonderful tools including a table saw, a dust collector,  a jointer, and a nice big work table.

Chest of Drawers with very old Joinery

Today, a very pretty, but dilapidated chest of drawers came in to our shop.   The wood has a nice grain structure which you just don't see in the modern fast growing woods used in current furniture.  But besides the beautiful quality of the wood, there is another thing about this chest which sets it apart as unique, as well as quite old.

The way the joinery was done tells us that this chest of drawers was made between  1870 and 1880.   These joints,  known as  Knapp Dovetail  or a Pinned Joint, were only used during that ten years. We get excited when we see this kind of joint because it is so rare.  Usually dovetails appear as triangular interlocking wedges, not as pegs and holes.

One more interesting  tidbit about pinned joints, we have never had to repair a drawer using that used this type of joinery.  Every piece that has come in has had tight fitting joints with no evidence of prior repair attempts.  It is clearly superior to standard dovetails in it's staying power.  It was not widely adopted because of the long term familiarity people had with dovetails and the belief that dovetails represented true quality workmanship.


The chest of  drawers is possibly made out of a southern yellow pine, but until it is stripped of it's finish, we will not know for sure.  This chest is going to undergo quite a transformation. We will have to do quite a bit of work to give the chest a new life.  I will be sure to let you know how the progress is going.  Now it it time for you to go check all your furniture and see if you detect any interesting old joints!

Our 'Block Work' leg is completed!

In two previous posts we showed you what we had been doing to repair a chair leg which the toe had  broken off of.  We started by gluing a new block of wood on, which you can read about in this post...


http://furniturerenewalist.blogspot.com/2010/12/block-work-on-broken-chair-legs.html

 Our next task was to carve and re-shape the block to match the existing leg.  This step is critical in making it so that the casual observer would never notice it was ever broken.  You can read about it in this post....




http://furniturerenewalist.blogspot.com/2010/12/hand-shaping-of-yesterdays-block-work.html


Now we have the work just about completed. In the photo to the left you can see the leg after it was stained then scuff sanded.  The scuff sanding step is crucial to a smooth finish.  We use a very fine sand paper, 320 grit, to knock off any burrs in the stain, and polish it to perfect smoothness.





The final step, which we just completed, was to to apply two coats of sealer, then two coats of 'top coat' to create a beautiful Satin finish.  The stain we used was an English Oak.  What do you think?  looks pretty good doesn't it?  Would you assume it had ever been broken?

Tambour Unit for a Roll Top Desk

We have been getting quite a few roll top desks in just lately.  At the moment we have 5 of them in our shop!  Of course what makes a roll top desk so distinctive is the movable top which is technically called a 'tambour unit'.    Usually these are made up of  several slats of wood, rounded on the front and flat on the back, the flat part of each slat is adhesed to a cloth, making the unit flexible.  They look something like the roll top you can see here...

This Tambour is a quite different though, so it required a creative solution for it's repair.  The front of each slat is made of a flat piece of veneer.  The veneer was then adhesed to the cloth, and a curved back piece was adhesed to the other side, basically sandwiching the cloth.  The veneer on the front was done so well, that when the desk top is closed, each individual piece of veneer perfectly matched the ones next to it and created an entire pattern.  Unfortunately, as so often happens, the cloth wore out.  If we had tried to replace the entire cloth, we would have lost the beautiful veneer work.  So after much contemplation, we came up with the solution you see in the pictures.   We laid the Unit on it's face and adhesed gauze strips along each slat, making sure each piece of gauze made contact with 3 surfaces, the front Tambour piece, and the back slats on each side.   Each individual gauze strip had to be pressed in place until the adhesive was set.  I am looking forward to turning this unique project over and seeing the lovely veneer face again, although this time it will be functioning!