A Few Repairs

All in , all done .... miracle recovery .... descriptive post below
We finished a couple of interesting repairs last week and I was sending photos to clients so I thought I would post them here too ... The bureau above is one of the last pieces of furniture we have to restore that was damaged in the fire I have occasionally written about. I thought it was a goner as it took several days in the sun to even get it open, and when we finally did, it really didn't look too promising ... Looks can be deceiving though and by the time Jim stripped the smoked shellac and sanded the interior and resealed it, I was starting to be just a little more optimistic. Click the photos to enlarge them ...
Here, Jim has stripped off the toasted shellac and sanded the interior, which he is now coating with a seal coat of shellac and wax to get rid of the smoke odor.
There were then some repair necessary to the face that that you can see in the first photo above ...
I chipped off what was left of the round corners and replaced them with new veneers. The masking tape was a good trick. It allowed me to bend the veneers cold without the pieces breaking or separating, kind of like a paper backed veneer would be, only thicker...
I taped them in place with the repair man's friend, 3M 2040 masking tape, a stretchy but strong and sticky clamp..
The stripped and sanded drawers ... What's up with that top one? ..
We applied a thin coat of aniline dye, recoating some elements a couple of times to balance the color, and then shellaced with a wash coat of diluted fresh amber shellac. We'll build slowly in thin coats from here until we reach the desired shine, which will not be too terribly shiny ... The hardware has been cleaned and 'reantiqued' and is ready to go back on when the finish is complete ... I think it will look like a million bucks when it's done ...
Another fire victim in the before stage ....
In the 'almost finished' stage. The brass was polished and then reantiqued and the shellac was built slowly as mentioned above ... We finished the top with a coat of black patinating wax which was perfect for the job .... The Revere bowl was totally black and looked almost hopeless before Jim got to work on it ...

This is another repair that came through recently from Hildene, Robert Todd Lincoln's home, in Manchester, Vermont. We had a huge windstorm a couple of weeks ago, which blew open the French doors at the house and knocked the table across the room
Before ...
After

Antique Repairs and Restorations

Repairs ... We love 'em ... If they could only talk; then they'd be even more interesting .... This pair of tables came in one at a time with the idea that we only had to put a leg back on one of them and patch a broken corner. However, they came in with a bureau that was a basket case when it arrived and looked like a million bucks when it left .... We fixed and delivered that piece first and when the client saw how her bureau had been transformed, she sent us the mate to the table above with instructions to tune them up and refinish the tops, which had suffered some serious damages over the years. So, as we worked with them, we dreamed up their story ... Who knows? Here's what we think..... Click the pictures to enlarge them as we go ...

Here's the bureau ... When it came to us, it looked like it had been in a barn for quite a while ... The drawer supports had all collapsed and the drawers didn't run, more than half of the base was off, the moldings were flapping ... Backboards were missing ... Will did a good job getting it all back together. It took a few hours, but it was definitely worth doing ... When it left, it looked great. Here's the deal on the tables ...

The builder was a skilled craftsmen. The inlays are nicely done, the veneers on the aprons appear to be hand sawn, and the tops of the pair of tables are pairs of bookmatched boards, 1,2,3 center middle outside ... The boards match .... not an accident .

We opted for scraping rather then stripping ... We find when we strip we always have to do a lot of sanding and that kills some of the handmadeness of the surfaces ... scraping's better in our opinion if you can do it ... The finish was not original and it was thin and flaky and actually shot off the front edge of the scraper as I worked.

After we got the leg back on there were about 10 places on the aprons and drawer faces that needed patching or regluing ... The aprons were bricklaid in about 6 layers and then veneered with the grain vertical . The red arrow shows a leg reinforced with a pair of hinges !! We left them there. They worked and you have to honor the history ...

We patched in a bunch of missing pieces and recolored them to match

Here's an interesting thing .... The legs were all cut at the point where the arrow is and the legs that are below that point on the tables now have a different finish and are held on by short half inch diameter dowels (we know cause they wiggle and we fixed one that was broken off) and in some cases hinges ... It also looks like the detail that is on the legs at one time was also on the aprons and drawer fronts.

One had a broken corner and a rotten spot that needed patching

Luckily I had a piece of crotch walnut with similar figure to make a patch

All in, all done ... and ready for the next 50 years or so ...

Update on the Front Door

10/1 Home stretch on the door project ... We had to go to the site yesterday to final refit the front door before final priming,painting and rehanging. The molding miters will need some patch and fill work and Tom of Keefe and Wesner Architects (restoration specialists) turned us on to a product by West Systems called 'microballoons'. You add this sort of mysterious powdery stuff to their epoxy and it makes what they refer to as a 'fairing' compound. Weatherproof, durable, carveable, sandable, paintable .... We made a sample Tuesday and it's pretty amazing stuff. More on that later ... Click photos to enlarge them.

The opening with it's granite sill

The inside view after refitting ... There was soooo much paint on the jamb edges that the door was thicker than the rabbett in which it fits. Over the years, it seems that the carpenters, when repainting and adding new hardware, had rehung the door further and further from its original location until when we first fitted it yesterday, it was about 3/16ths pround of its jambs. Luckily, we were able to rerout the jambs in place and now it swings freely, fits flush and doesn't bind ... we'll add new weatherstripping after it's painted and rehung.

From the outside with the new knocker in place
Update 9/22

Trevor has made one continuous patch to cover the historical assortment that has accumulated on the outside ... The new knocker will cover the old knocker holes .... the small patch was a knot that had fallen out ...

And we've laid out the Ball & Ball lockset location )love their stuff). He'll fill the round holes and do another 'one patch' on the inside.
9/19/09
Another project we're working on for the painted library house is the front door. Originally, our scope of work included making a new front door similar to the original. We didn't pay too much attention to the old one at first as it had some 1960's or 1970's era lacquered brass hardware and some really thick bad paint. But, when I decided to take the original door to copy it, we started to look at it more closely and decided that, yeah, maybe it was old and we'll strip it first and see what it looks like. I took it to my friend Alan Tschorn at Chem Clean in Arlington, Vermont and he put it in his dip tank for a soak. When we got it back, it showed some past insults, but it was definitely an old door. We're feeling like it could maybe possibly be the original after removing the moldings that were loosened by the stripping process. The panels are all one piece, not narrow glued up boards. Some are bookmatched (the two horizontal top ones) or obviously from the same board, and all the nails appear to be from the same period and manufacturer. I'm actually not familiar with the exact style, but it appears to be an early 'cut' nail, stamped from a sheet possibly by a local Vermonter. Check the nails out below ... Click the pictures to enlarge them ...

Interior view of the original entryway ...

On our first site visit, we took measurements to estimate a price to copy the existing door. This house has beautiful, original, cut granite foundations and note the granite sill detail ... You don't see that often ...

Back from the strippers ... interior view

Exterior view showing clearly the patches that accumulated over the years as hardware and locks were changed ..

The door with all its exterior panel molding removed. To get the first one out we drove the two nails holding the molding through and then pried it up. Once that one was out, the others could be removed with their nails ....

Paint and stripper remained under the hand plane shaped moldings

The nails ... two per strip of molding, 8 per panel, carefully and symmetrically placed by the original maker. Note the square ground nailset for setting the nails through ... We'll patch the holes neatly, and make accomodtions for the new Ball and Ball hardware ... It'll be sweet when it's repainted and I'm sure it will be happy to get back home ....

Making A Partners Desk

These clients bought this desk at an antiques show a while back at a very reasonable price. It only had a drawer on one side and it was, like, 42" deep, so it seemed, wherever they put it, it was too wide/deep. They didn't pay much for it so they asked if I would mind cutting the back apron, which was totally plain, and adding a drawer to the other side and some fake moldings to dress it up. It seemed reasonable to me so we had at it ... 'came out good', as they say ... click the photos to enlarge them ....

I cut the opening for the drawer in the apron with a fine toothed handsaw. The runners for the main original drawer ran all the way to the back apron so it was easy to determine where to cut it, (the drawer was half the desk deep, coincidentally). Then we scanned half the face of the front drawer (10") and Trevor was able to draw the shape and cut the piece that I cut out of the apron to shape on the CNC. Next he offset that cut and cut a new molding from another piece of stock and we glued that on and colored it to match. Then we added a stained drawer box, detailed as the nailed together original drawer, and we were half way there. The front of the desk had a center drawer and two side drawers with little cockbead moldings, so we copied the moldings using a couple different cutters on the shaper, sanded them, and tacked them on. It looked better than I expected when we were through and the clients were thrilled. There is probably something to discuss here about maiming antiques. I've watched enough 'Roadshow' to know the risks and we did discuss carefully what we were doing. These folks are professional designers and collectors, not dealers; it was their piece and their decision to make the piece more functional for their own use, and I was sure what we did couldn't be passed off in the future as orginal so I agreed to do it. ... click the photos to enlarge them ...

The piece I cut out, Trevor's cut, and the cnc made molding

With the new drawer box, but before the extra applied moldings

The completed project .... I thought I took a photo of the original desk front, (the other side) but I can't find it.

Another Interesting Repair

We fixed a desk for the niece of one of our longtime customers recently. It was her grandmother's desk, and one of it's legs had been broken (and repaired) several times. She had moved to a new house and could no longer prop it in the corner as she had in the past. It was a cool piece with nice carvings, some slick hardware that pushed out the flap supports when you pulled open the desk front, and onyx drawer faces and gallery details inside. It took some creative gluing and clamping to reattach the carved foot but it looked pretty good when it was done, if I do say so myself ... Click the photos to enlarge them ...

Badly repaired break

planed the ends smooth

Figured out how much was missing

We screwed a piece of plywood to the other three legs to locate the broken foot contact and put a temporary leg the right length in place so that when the leg was fixed, the desk would sit level.

Finished the joinery , doweled it as it was and glued it up with the broken foot

Rough shaped it

Did some minimal suggestive carving

Opened it up and found we needed to get rid of the blotter paper that was taped in there and get some leather down.

Stretched a piece of leather over some scrap plywood, made a luan ply pattern and cut the leather to exact size. masked off the desk and sprayed 3M Spray 90 adhesive on the leather and the desk insert. We put a piece of wax paper under most of the leather and slowly pressed the leather down and tugged the wax paper along, stretching the leather as we pushed it ( glued it ) into place. In the end, the width was good but we had to trim about 1'4" off the length in place.

There were some sweet onyx drawer faces that needed some refitting and handle reattachment and the two columns in the center were 'secret' compartments ... Loved the whole thing when it was done and so did the client when we dropped it off last week.