Furniture restoration in Surrey, examples of two items transformed!

As is always the case, thankfully(!), furniture restoration in Surrey is always in demand.  I suppose this is because there are so many beautiful properties in the area, many of which have a large selection of antiques and fine furniture.  Meanwhile, most Britons have a fondness for old items of furniture (whether wealthy or not) and implicitly appreciate their value.  Equally, there are few of us who have not inherited antiques that are either valuable in their own right or that lack real sentimental value. Recently, we have been working on many different items, amongst which has been the oak table and gilt mirror shown here. The oak table, when it was brought into our workshop was almost black!  It really was quite horrible and required considerable work to bring it back to its previous glory.  A good deal of careful cleaning was required and then we were able to…

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Chair repairs in the Guildford and Dorking areas

Of all the many combinations of furniture and antiques that we receive for repair and restoration at our workshops in Shere, it is chairs that are the most common. Frankly, this is not all that surprising; given the very tough, long term usage that chairs get.  Equally, the construction of chairs is such that they are, in many ways, innately delicate objects.  They are assembled from many different pieces, all of which are doweled or interlocking, and, if just one joint gives way or loosens, then very quickly thereafter other joints also untighten.  The whole chair then becomes unstable; with every likelihood, that one piece or another will either break altogether or come away from its fixing. Obviously, the best time to bring a chair in for repair is before anything breaks or the joints throughout the entire chair start to come apart.  However, normally, the joints of a chair…

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Repairs to chairs in Surrey

Do you have a chair in Surrey like the one above – a common enough problem? Or do you have chairs that are starting to wobble as the glue to the joints weakens, something that happens a lot with antique furniture. If you do then contact us, as we undertake an endless amount of chair repair in Surrey – and we have handled just about every kind imaginable. The trouble, of course, with chairs is that once they start to move then that movement only gets worse and can, lead to the breaking of parts of the chair itself.  This can be galling and often involve skilled work to produce new turnings or legs to match any that have been broken.  To match these in with the existing finish and patina of a chair can be done (a speciality of ours!) but it should not be necessary. If you have…

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Chair repair in Surrey

Chair repair in Surrey presents particular problems for any furniture repair and restoration specialist.  This is because of the multiple structural dimensions of chairs and their requirement (of course!) to be load bearing. As we all know, if just one part of the structure of a chair is damaged or becomes loose then this very quickly affects the whole chair so that it quickly loses its integrity.  Indeed, in no time at all a chair can reach the point of collapse! The problem for anyone involved in furniture repair is that restoring chairs is often a very committing process.  Indeed, frequently chair repair involves the disassembling of a whole chair into its constituent pieces – before it can be carefully ‘re-built’ and glued together. At Snelling Associates we undertake a lot of chair repair in Surrey.  Apart from correcting the structural integrity of chairs, we also colour, clean and polish…

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