Almost a Gonner

Check out this precious old rocker. My customer reports to me that it came from the Oxford Hotel in downtown Denver. At that time, the 1890's, it was probably one of several like it made available to patrons on a closed hotel porch. So there's a lot of fun history here, and oh the stories it could probably tell!

The rocker is fashioned from Beech Wood. Looking closely, it has those distinctive Beech Wood grain flecks. And look at those wonderful turned spindles. Curves, curves, curves with predictable repetition and some splendid uniformity. It's all very typical of the Art Noveau style influencing the 1890's (and through about 1920). 

The rocker was originally finished with Tung Oil. Then somewhere along it's timeline it was stained and re-covered with the oil, but not before it was stained with a Mahogany like stain, over the original oil. The seat cut-out was tooled leather and

fastened in place with a marvelous brass buttoned ring, oh so pretty. A beautiful package for sure. But sadly, it is now exactly what time and circumstance does to everyone. With hope and maybe some promises of what it can be again, it's here in the Woodtalkin shop. Yaaay!

As I'm writing this much progress has been made. I took it apart piece-by-piece to carefully strip the flat surfaces and ALL the spindles. I'll be making a new spindle, because one has

been broken and lost. And one side of the seat is broken where the new spindles fit to support the arm. Those are being refabricated "as we speak." 

I chucked each spindle in my shop lathe in order to make the sanding effort more effective. If you've ever worked with Tung Oil you know that once it's cured on a piece it's extremely difficult to remove. And I had beaucoup intricate spindles to remove two layers of tung oil "sandwiching" the darker oil stain. Very challenging. Slowly but surely piece-by-piece they were all sanded and prepared for the next appropriate step in the process, dry reassembly. 

It's been a lot of work and very much a collaborative effort with my customer. From the beginning his plan has been to present the finished rocker to his wife, a wonderful Christmas present. It was all done a couple weeks before Christmas, but the seat insert was a project he and his daughter took on. Their effort resulted in a wonderful outcome. It is one I will certainly not forget.

 

The finished rocker is pictured below. So, what do you think. Amazingly beautiful I think. 

That's WoodTalkin for today. Be listening... WoodTalks.



A Quick and Important Heads Up

Hi. I had dodged Covid since March 2020. Yaaay! But not anymore. My wife and I both tested positive late this past week. Bummer! Vaccinated and boosted our symptoms have been typical of the A-15 strain,  but this hasn't been fun.  Comparatively,  I've been as sick and uncomfortable as I have ever been with a flu virus. 

Also...before this Covid interruption I had planned to take 3-4 days to catch up on some required continuing education requirements. Those requirements MUST be addressed. 

So the shop is closed temporarily closed for now until I can get this stuff confidently in my rear view mirror. In the meantime please check back here for the timely updates.  

Thank you all. You are so greatly appreciated!

Dick Brandow

WoodTalkin

720.350.2992

Just a Before & After

Sometimes it's fun and maybe even helpful to gloat just a little.  This very practical piece,  a closed dresser,  is of 1920's-1930's vintage.

It's one of several pieces,  one piece of a bedroom suite  I was privileged to refinish.  It had been well taken care of through just a couple owners,  including the years my customer has had it. And just like the rest of us,  stuff gets tired and begins to need some cosmetic--and even structural help. 

This piece's structural issues were my biggest challenge.  Several of the wooden drawer slides inside the case were "done." They were broken, and parts of them were even long lost.  Making those functional repairs required some care and some ingenuity. But it was doable and the final product is a happy outcome for everyone involved. 

The pictures I've posted here give you some idea what the piece looked like fully stripped, and then when it's all finished before all the doors are hardware are replaced, and then finally it's all back together.  Please notice the two little decorative pieces, one on the top's "fence" and the other on the first middle drawer. 

Check out the pulls on the drawers,  right and left,  and on the two doors.

These pulls are solid silver! That was a surprise to me,  but even more so to my customer.  When she acquired the piece many years ago they were already tarnished,  so she had no idea they were anything more than dark grey. When I polished then up and showed them to her, wow,  was she  surprised...and delighted! It was a feels-good moment for us both. 

Ok,  about those two decorative pieces. These two were made of oven-baked moulded resin. I couldn't find exact replicas,  so we left these (for now) just as you see them there,  cleaned and finished.  But,  and just for your information,  facsimiles are available. 

Ok.  That's WoodTalkin for today.  Keep listening, and remember,  your pieces have stories to tell!

Monday's Update.

I'm back in the shop starting TODAY.  YAAY!

And that's today's WOODTALKIN. See you soon. 

Dick 👍👍

720-350-2992

Post Surgery Update

Hi,
Welcome to WoodTalkin.

Here's a fun little Limerick that explains what's going on for me and the shop right now: 

"Patience is a virtue. Possess it if you can. Seldom found in women, but never found in man."

 The first week in September I had surgery on my left thumb. It  repaired a painful bone-on-bone joint. Then I awkwardly worked through the fall completing customer's projects right up until Thanksgiving.  The 1st week in December I had the same surgery performed on my right thumb--my dominant hand. Now,  with both hands at less then 60%, just tying my shoes has become a whole lot harder!

I haven't been able to get back in the shop to get things going again---yet.  But I'm evaluating my progress week-to-week and daily.... impatiently.  Don't hesitate to call me! I can come to your home,  do estimates, and we can discuss costs and options for the projects you might want me to tackle. I'll put your project on the jobs board and into the work que. Then we'll be ready to go as soon as I get the anticipated double Thumbs Up. Yaay👍👍.

Thanks for your patience!

Dick Brandow

-350-2992

1940s Quality

Here's a fun discussion. My customer contacted me to refinish a dining room set his wife recently inherited. She had grown up with it in her parents home. Since then it had been refinished in a darker color, but it needed that kind of special attention again. A dining room table with two leaves, six chairs including a captain's chair, and a matching 4-drawer, 2-door buffet finished out the set. All of it is made of solid hard maple--no veneers our core woods anywhere!

All these dining room jewels (below) were made by the Haywood-Wakefield Furniture Company in the late 1930s through the mid -1960s. They have the signature 40s-60s look. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.

When it comes to "appreciating" the style that distinguishes a period, it helps to do some homework. In this situation this is
an heirloom set that my customer loves being around. It doesn't have 21st century contemporary lines or color, but the quality of these pieces--the wood and workmanship--is second to none...and it's highly collectible. The table and chairs, for example, are well worth $1400 and the buffet is probably valued at or around half that price in and of itself...as is. You may be able to find debatably "nicer" contemporary pieces in today's furniture market, but never this quality combination of wood and workmanship. Just ask the piece--if it could only answer for ALL to hear--and it would tell us, with it's chest puffed way up, all about it's glorious past!

My customers wanted this sweet combination returned to it's past glory. For them that meant I needed to research the original color and patina and know how I could replicate them. They wanted all the pieces to look just the way she remembered the set when she was a little girl. So, that's exactly what we did. We had to begin by doing OUR homework.

What you see below us what the respective pieces looked like before any work was done. I'll soon update this post with a picture of the finished dining set. In the meantime my customer is having the chair seats redone in "original" patterns.

That's Wood Talkin for today. Please keep listening, because wood really does have a story to tell!

Dick

Danish Ingenuity

When was the last time you saw or sat at a table like this? You may not have known it was one of these. Danish in design and ingenuity, it expands and shrinks by sliding the end sections out from under or back under the center section. There are no gears or locks; it's all slip action and easy...ingenious.

This antique beauty has a dual pedestal base. It's all solid oak. It was probably a proprietory clear varnish on this oak. It appears to be a shellac now. It's elegant and simple and very special. This one came to the shop to make a minor but complicated adjustment in how the closure fit on one end.

Probably influenced by time and some predictable shrinkage, the curvature on one side of it's "leaf" didn't tightly match the corresponding rounded corner of the center piece's rounded edge. (see the pic) We did not completely eliminate the gap, but we were able to almost close it...almost. It looks much better! What do you think? (Right, how it looked before; left, how it is now)

Ok. That's Wood Talkin for today. Keep listening. This is fun!

Dick

It's Twisted!

Here's a gem from top to bottom and from beginning to end.
Our customers recently experienced some disappointing and painful surprises. Aargh! (Life bites! sometimes, huh.) So the family decided to have this fine custom-built maple table redone to serve some critical upcoming family gathering plans---and hopefully before the up and coming Christmas holidays!  

The top of this beauty is just shy of 72 inches in diameter, so it's both big AND beautiful. Just take a long look at that pedestal base (below)! It's "twisted" 90 degrees from bottom to top.  Is that cool or what?!

The base's four-inch circular twists (below), a total of eight, really help distinguish this piece. The size of the top on that stunning  base and the visual depth we anticipate in the top's maple grain will really make it visually exquisite when all the work is done. 

I'm showing it to you in pieces here simply because we couldn't put the top on it's base in the shop. It occupied a third of the shop for almost two weeks, so we had to schedule it into our work accordingly.


In keeping with the home's decor we were asked to try matching the table to the color of their home's floors (above left). That process took some trial and error (and some back-and-forth), but I think you'll agree the effort was successful.  You can see a piece of the hickory floor we "borrowed" to help us approach a color match on the table's top and base.

 

Here are a couple pictures of the base and the top respectively. I'll acquire and publish a picture of the table in the family home and all together in a future blog. God willing our customer will move back into their newly refurbished home before Christmas. In the meantime these two pics will have to do.

That's Wood Talkin for today, but keep listening...because wood has a voice of its own.

Dick

A Front Door

Everybody coming to the house sees it up close and personal. So we all tend to take them for granted. This one is no exception. It's on a home built in the 1980s and as design would dictate, it's on the home's southern face under a small covered stoop. So it's taken an environmental beating. Hot sun, dry and ultraviolet extremes with little reprieve day after day....taken for granted.

So......what's a faithful and dependable door to do? Well this handsome maple sentry is getting a long deserved face lift. Boy is it happy, and he's telling us as much and enjoying every minute of this pampering.

This handsome guy, with leaded-in glass lights, trimmed panels and moulding surrounds has every reason to be confident. He's had his down season, but it will soon be history. He'll be able to strut his stuff across the neighborhood! We'll offer an update in a forthcoming blog.

So, here is to listening, because of course Wood is Talkin.

DICK

A Perennial Charmer

Here's a handsome piece we see often. These aromatic cedar chests are so readily displayable and they are so practical as well. This one, manufactured in the early 1940s, is really in excellent condition. Yes, it needs some attention to it's mahogany finish and had lost some tiny pieces of veneer, but the chest's air seal is intact, it's under the case drawer is in great shape and slides smoothly, and it's internal shelf and linkage are in great working condition. That's a lot more than we can say for many of us after 70 years of hanging around. Ha.

Our customer asked us to put some legs on this little charmer. So what you see in the picture is what we did. It gave her a nice three inch lift...some fun high heels!

We gently stripped and cleaned this little beauty. It's got a lacquer seal coat and two coats of gloss finish lacquer...gently nibbed and then buffed. She wants to go home; a real serious case of home sickness!

That's Wood Talkin for today. Listen, listen, listen!

Dick

175 Years of Sophistication and Beauty

This beauty came into the Wood Talkin shop last week. Our customer's goal is to enhance her finish, so we engaged some careful discussion around what that meant to her, the impact of any effort on the value of this fine piece of art, and our customer's long-term plans for this piece.

Everything about this old beauty says "art." From her drawers' hand-scribed dovetail joints, autographed frame, deeply worn drawer slides, square hand-forged nails, cast iron and porcelain castors, rough sawn internal and back-closure pieces...we conclude that she is pre-1840, and probably 1820-1830.

Add caption

This was a square weight bearing side of the drawer slide worn convex through 175 years!

Four (count them!) hand scribed and then cut dovetail joints on each drawer. Can you see the scribe marks?

Memories Restored

Here's a1900's little beauty.This little tray table came to us in pieces....12 of them! The only missing piece was the top surface. Our customer found this little promise at a garage sale placed in an open cardboard box. She immediately recognized it as identical to a little table she cherished from her own home as a child. It's not the same table, but one of the same design. It spoke to her heart, "Please rescue me."

She did. She bought this cardboard box of promise and brought it to us at Wood Talkin. "Can you put this back together and refinish it like it would have looked back then?" Sure thing.

So, about ten days later....here it is (through several stages of finish), now ready to go"back" home...to the love and affections of someone who will do just that, love this little table, a promise...realized again.

Ok then. That's Wood Talkin for today.....please keep listening.

An Eastern Beauty

Here's a remarkable beauty. Keep this thought in mind. This amazing piece of art is well over 200 years old! Throughout the centuries she has remained under the loving watch care of one family. For two of those centuries she was in Srilanka, then she was transported across the Atlantic, and then across the United States!

Standing nearly seven feet tall, she sits assembled in thee pieces; a foundation, base cabinet, and top cabinet. Of course she is all hand made by an artist of incredible patience working in far Eastern hard woods, e.g., mahogany and ebony. And she has seen multiple repair efforts. The evidence of those efforts, probably by family members through the years, were of course more utilitarian and well-intended in the moment than they were artistic or skilful.

All that heavy hard wood atop just four carved legs, and moved (probably uneasily shoved about), an effort punctuated by grunts and protests--both from those shoving and by the base--had left the base's joints increasingly broken and loose. So, she had gradually become a danger to be around. A timely and patient strengthening of her base was the order off the day.

As you see her here she sits poised and proud again, and back home where she belongs. She is all ready to preside in her new home where those who know, love and respect her will again, God willing, appreciate her through several more generations.

That's Wood Talkin for today. Are you listening?
Dick

CONTEMPORARY

Yes, the shop sees more than antiques. This is a good example of some fun challenges we get to face. In this case we were asked to change the look of some great furniture, Stanley
..Lane...and others.

Our customer wants an distressed ebony look...so that was the goal. Five pieces including a small wall shelf,  a pine dresser, and the legs and under-frame of a small overstuff  couch, all refinished to delight our customer.

That's Wood Talkin for today
Be listening...wood talks!

At the Door...

New arrivals this past week or so include...
Four wonderful antique red oak dining chairs and a wonderful antique red oak library table. Yes, these have their own stories to tell, and yes, a great part of their stories is in the obvious scars they have to show for the tales.

So, we'll be back...and keep listening.

A QUESTION OF IDENTITY

Quite occasionally we get a piece that has no identification. (It's sorta like you or I getting stopped for a traffic violation and not having a drivers license or proof of insurance.) No, I'm not arresting or citing anyone for bringing a piece in the door that has no manufacturer's identifying marks, but I'm always wondering...wondering. "Who put this piece together?"

Recently these pieces (covered, right) arrived in the shop. They are very obviously well made and very upscale in the quality of their finish. So it's always nice to put a "name on the face" so to speak. The tops of these two bedside tables needed to be refinished; several other areas on each piece had suffered similar damage. The lacquer finish is still very much alive, suggesting they were manufactured within the past 10 years or so.

These two came with a similarly finished Sleigh Bed designed headboard and matching foot-board. Their top horizontal rails (not yet pictured) are being stripped and refinished to remove several scars and dents and then the vertical posts will be be touched-up. These will be followed into the shop by two standing dressers. They complete the set. Their arrival in the shop is anticipated just as soon as these items are completed and deliverable--ready to trade them places.

Sometimes the wood doesn't say as much as we'd like it to. Hmmm, some people are that way too, huh.

That's Wood Talkin for today.

Dick

"Incoming!"

Here are that latest new additions on the shop floor...waiting their respective opportunities for some time and loving attention. Yup, I know, nobody wants to stand in line, but hey, these guys (and gals) know it's worth the wait!

I'll be telling you more about this pretty little leather-inlaid side table soon (it's got a twin who wasn't included this time, so we've gotta talk softly...shhhh.)

Till next time, that's Wood Talkin. Are you listening?

Dick

They say they want to go home!

This furniture manufactured by Henredon in North Carolina is really attractive stuff. Much appreciation to their Customer Service people for the help they were able to offer. So, two days in the application of the finish coats (i.e., repeated spraying, curing and sanding) we're ready for the last step--buffing them out. Does anything really feel better than success?!