INTRODUCTION

The art of furniture restoration can be an expensive, time-consuming, and sometimes risky business. Often it is left to the hands of professionals, and where in certain cases this is the best thing to do, it is possibly to restore furniture yourself as long as you keep to certain guidelines and principles in restoring your furniture.

KNOWING YOUR FURNITURE

The first thing to do before you start is to know your piece of furniture. That means knowing what sort of wood it is made of and what sort of finish is there already. A specialist furniture restorer will have that knowledge whereas an amateur may not. Do be sure that you know exactly what wood and finish you are dealing with, otherwise there is a much higher risk of using either the wrong materials or the wrong techniques in your furniture restoration project.

In terms of maintaining the value of your furniture, it is almost always better to maintain your furniture with the same finish rather than a completely new finish, as this may in fact decrease the value of your antique furniture.

RESTORING YOUR FURNITURE

Before you get carried away with your furniture restoration project, make sure that you clean your furniture. What may seem to be damage may be nothing more than dirt, and a good clean first will either show that the furniture doesn’t need extensive restoration or it will show up more clearly those areas that need extra help.

If the item of furniture hasn’t been cleaned for a long time, then there may be a considerable build up of dirt that needs removing over several attempts. For this, any standard cleaner appropriate for the material to be cleaned (wood, leather etc.) from a supermarket would do. Use a brand that is well known and use new clean cloths and follow the instructions very carefully. It may be necessary to remove the wax buildup that has accumulated over the years, in which case use a good quality wax remover as well. Fine steel wool, along with an appropriate oil, can be a very effective way of balancing up problems with a discolored finish.

In furniture restoration however, as with many areas of life, you get what you pay for, and it may be worth buying from and taking advice from a retailer that specializes in selling materials for furniture restoration, rather than just picking up or using the same domestic products you might use on your own modern furniture.

Restoration may be a matter of improving the quality of the wood joints, in which case if possible, disassembling and reassembling the furniture item may be possible as part of the restoration process. Of course, for many items of furniture this won’t be possible, and in any case such complicated restoration may be better undertaken by a professional.

CONCLUSION

The key to remember in antique furniture restoration is that you are not trying to make the furniture look new, but instead restore its former glory as far as possible, maintaining the balance between how the product will look after restoration and its value. If you go to any museum and look at antique furniture, you will see that restorers place the focus on keeping the furniture as original as possible rather than looking as clean and ‘new’ as possible, and so the products that you choose for your antique furniture restoration and your techniques, should follow that same principle. Beyond the scope of this article, My Home Repair is a pretty good resource for very specific furniture restoration topics.