Furniture Repair, Refinishing & Restoration in Rhode Island

What we repair and restore

Furniture fails in a small number of predictable ways, and most of them are fixable.

• —Loose and failed joints — chairs that rack, tables that wobble, case pieces gone out of square
• —Structural breaks — cracked legs, split rails, broken stretchers
• —Stripping and refinishing — taking a tired or damaged finish back to bare wood and building a new one
• —Finish repair — where the piece doesn't need a full strip, just attention
• —Veneer work — lifting, bubbling, and missing patches
• —Drawer repair — rebuilt runners, re-glued boxes, drawers that bind or drop
• —Water, heat and sun damage
• —Hardware — repair, replacement, and sourcing period-appropriate pulls and hinges
• —Modification — shortening a table, adapting a piece for a new use

Repair, refinish, or leave it alone

The first question on any older piece is how much to do, and the honest answer is sometimes "less than you're asking for."

On genuine antiques, an original finish is part of what the piece is. Stripping it can remove real value along with the scratches. Where a finish is largely intact, cleaning, reviving and spot-repairing often produces a better result than a full strip — the piece keeps its history and stops looking tired.

A full strip and refinish is the right call when the existing finish has failed outright: heavy water damage, alligatored varnish, sun bleaching across one side, or a previous refinish done badly. We'll tell you which situation you're in before we start, and if we think a piece should be left mostly alone, we'll say so.

Structural repair

Most wobbly furniture is a glue failure, not a wood failure. Hide glue and older adhesives let go over decades, especially in a coastal climate where humidity swings. The correct fix is to take the joint apart, clean out the old glue completely, and re-glue it — not to inject fresh glue into a dirty joint or drive a screw through it, both of which buy a year and make the real repair harder.

Where wood has actually broken, the repair depends on where the load goes. A clean break along the grain can often be glued and clamped to full original strength. A break across the grain in a load-bearing part usually needs reinforcement, or a new part made to match. For a missing or unsalvageable component we'll build a replacement in matching species and finish it to blend.

Finish work

Refinishing starts with identifying what's on the piece. Shellac, lacquer, oil and polyurethane strip differently, take color differently, and fail differently — and getting this wrong at the start costs a lot of time later. Shellac in particular is common on older American furniture and dissolves with alcohol, which is both convenient and a hazard if you don't know it's there.

Color matching is done with sample boards, tested against the piece itself in the light the piece will live in. Wood color looks different under shop fluorescents than in your dining room, and matching by memory across a drive home does not work.

The final film is chosen for how the piece is used. A dining table needs to survive wet glasses and hot dishes. A dresser top needs to look right more than it needs to be bulletproof.

Is your piece worth restoring?

Sometimes the answer is no, and it's better to hear that up front. Restoration is labor, and labor on a piece that was cheaply made to begin with can exceed what it would cost to replace.

The pieces that are almost always worth it: solid wood construction, real joinery, something with family history, or anything you'd be unhappy to lose. The ones that usually aren't: particleboard carcasses, stapled joints, and veneer over MDF where the substrate has swelled.

Send photos — overall shots plus close-ups of the damage and any joints that have failed — and we'll give you a straight assessment of what the piece needs, what it would cost, and whether we think it's worth doing. That assessment is free, and there's no pressure attached to it.