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

Just Hangin Around Again

I'm baaaaaack! Of course that's the line every anxious movie goer anticipated in response to Arnold Schwartzenneger' famous line, "I'll be back."

Well, this beautiful door is hanging around the neighborhood again; it's back. It's in a difficult spot in a difficult climate under a comparatively small stoop...little protection from the elements. So our customer wanted to have it refinished in a quality oil, a product they could easily and routinely maintain and one that could handle the temperature extremes and the ultraviolet at 5600 feet elevation.

So there it is all handsome and bursting with character....and that's Wood Talkin for today.

KEEP LISTENING...because wood talks.

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

An Institutional Rocker?

Here's maybe a curious story....and maybe you can clarify a detail our two?

A special customer belongs to this fascinating solid mapel rocker. It has a fold-down portion that lifts to make a half-table on one side. I suspect this hand-made beauty may have been built in an institutional shop, like a hospital or turn-of-the-century Sanitorium. As you can see, both the back and it's seat are canned in a Herringbone pattern.

Our customer called us to repair a broken dowel in the frame of the caned seat. But what appeared to be a reasonably doable repair....replacing the dowel...was quickly complicated by the tightness of the cane woven seat. It means that the seat must be cut away to accommodate the new dowel, then the cane can be replaced. So, that's where we're at right now,  we're caning the seat having replaced the dowel and resetting and gluing the joints. It'll soon be good as new.

That's Wood Talkin for today....do you listen to your furniture?