How to Choose the Best Shop to Repair Your Prized Antique Furniture

Interior designers in Los Angeles love to buy antique furniture at Work of Man Studios not only because we have one of the largest in house and online collections to choose from, but also because of our expertise in repairing / restoring antique furniture. For those outside the Los Angeles area, finding the right place to repair your prized piece of antique furniture is critical to restoring its beauty and protecting its value. In the hands of a charlatan novice restorer your piece can be significantly devalued or ruined altogether. Restoration work is not inexpensive so it pays to find the right shop to have the job done right the first time. Too many times we’ve seen how interior designers in Los Angeles have learned this lesson the hard way when they brought us a piece that had just been “restored” but in a very wrong way and needed to be redone. 

Here are some key points to look for:

• Are they able to determine what the original finish was? Can they tell you if it is still present?
• Are they able to determine what the existing finish on the surface is?
• Do they recommend stripping the existing finish down to the bare wood & refinishing entirely?
• Do they recommend sanding out deep scratches or stains?
• Do they recommend using nails or screws to repair broken pieces?
• Do they recommend replacing missing wood with wood putty or epoxy?
• Do they recommend filling in holes, gouges, missing veneer chips, etc. with wood putty or epoxy?
• What type of glue do they recommend using when repairing loose joints or moldings?
• Do they recommend replacing larger sections with plywood or particle board?
• Do they recommend making larger repairs or replacement pieces out of newly purchased wood of the same species?
• Do they recommend a sprayed lacquer finish?
• Do they recommend some of the newer modern day acrylic finishes?

These are all excellent questions to ask before you leave a piece for repair / restoration. We will be further exploring each question in depth in future blog posts. For now, it is good for you to know that the restoration process of fine antiques is complicated and requires years of trials and tribulations to accumulate the experience to be able to evaluate a piece of antique furniture, to determine the best course for restoration and to execute the restoration work. 

Interior designers that we’ve worked with in Los Angeles know this well. This is one of the reasons why interior designers in Los Angeles love to shop at Work of Man Studios and consider it one of the best places to buy antique furniture in Los Angeles. When you buy antiques from Work of Man you will get the value of our expertise and insight into the history, the style, the quality, the condition and the value of each piece. Further, interior designers have found that buying an antique and having restoration work done at Work of Man not only saves time and energy but eliminates the worry that the job gets done correctly.