'Touch & Top' Job For an Old Finish

I know I just put up a post about a coffee table, but this is a completely different kind of job,  so bear with me on this.

This time we didn't strip and refinish the coffee table, but instead performed a 'touch and top' job.  This means we went in and touched up all the scrapes and scars by hand.  This is the kind of work that needs an artist, someone who can match and blend color and grain patterns so that the touchup repair disappears.

After the touchup work was done, we top-coated with a clear water based finish that will protect not just our repairs, but the rest of the finish as well.  This top coat gives a new lustrous sheen to the coffee table and almost looks like we refinished it.

If you have something lying around your house that is showing some ware and tear, but you don't want to change the color/finish, we can still make it look a lot better for you by performing similar work.  Bring that piece in to us and we can go over your options.

Dog Chewed Table Leg

 This is not our first post about having to repair a piece of furniture that has been the victim of a teething puppy.  Unfortunately, wood is such a great surface for puppies to chew on.  The owner of this table did the right thing though in bringing the table legs to us.

We began by filling the damaged areas and contouring them to the correct shape.  The entire length of the corner we were able to fill with wood, and the smaller, more oddly shaped damage we filled with a wood colored epoxy putty.   You can see the result of those structural repairs in the above picture.  From there it left the hands of our Repair Craftsman and entered the Touchup Man's territory.   He did all the cosmetic repairs to the leg.  A few different methods were used, including burn-ins and hand paining in the woodgrain with pigment powder colors.  The damage to the table leg is now invisible.    The tricky thing about touchup repairs, is that if you know where the damage originally was, you can almost always look hard and find it again,  but if you don't know where the damage was,  you will never find it.

The leg is now ready to take it's place back in the dining room.  Hopefully the puppy has found some better things to chew on and will leave this piece of furniture alone.

Fancy Marquetry Table gets a Touchup

 This home made marquetry table came to us because the veneer  on the top was damaged and peeling. We stripped the table and then went to work re-gluing the raised areas and cutting new pieces where the veneer had to be replaced all together.

All the veneer repairs have been completed, but there were still flaws in the marquetry all over the place and these had to be corrected with touchup.  Some of the flaws were simply because the wood was not the same age, and so hadn't darkened with time,  and some of them were from the original veneer that had tiny little breaks and nicks.
Our color wizard chose 3 different pigment powders from his collection to create this mustardy yellow.  He used White, Green, Canary Yellow and Pine.  This is the mixture for just one of the colors he had to use, each different wood type he touched up on this piece needed it's own special custom blend.

This table top uses many different kinds of woods including Birds Eye Maple, Rosewood, Lacewood, Elm and Ebony.  The colors he chose, along with his expert fine gran strokes, blended perfectly with each wood he was working on.  The table top looks beautiful and is ready for it's final step,  a coat of orange Shellac over the entire table.  

Classic Hitchcock Chairs get a Touchup

These beautiful  'Hitchcock' style chairs have received much loving use over the years.  As a result the black paint on the arm and top rails has worn off from handling, and there are 'table rub' marks on the spindles of the side chairs.  To repair these chairs, we went to our color touchup man with the magic fingers.  All the worn areas needed some delicate sanding with very fine grit paper to finesse the contours and make sure the new color could easily blend with the old.  They then received new color to the worn areas and a clear top coat.

The chairs now look good as new.  You would  never know that they had been worn looking.  Our guy in the shop did a great job.

Hitchcock chairs have been around for quite some time and they are still very similar to what they looked like originally.  In 1818 Lambert Hitchcock started the Hitchcock Chair Company, his vision was to create beautiful affordable mass produced chairs.  They also used a relatively new idea,  instead of hand painting a design on the back of each chair,  he used the easier technique of stenciling.  This stenciling gives the Hitchcock chair a unique and very distinguishable look.  By 1820 his company was producing over 15,000 chairs a year!  

While the Hitchcock Chair Company has changed hands a few times,  the company is still in existence and are still making this beautiful classic design.