Renovating

A Family Restoration – Kitchen Table

This is a family restoration the piece in question belonged to my wife's grandmother. I twas most likely a dressing table or a washstand. There is evidence on the top that something was screwed to it in the past. Grandma used it as a kitchen table (which is what I will refer to it as) and bench which means the top took a beating.  Other than that the piece was in reasonably good condition. There were no manufacturer's marks which makes dating the piece difficult. Im no expert but it looks Edwardian to me  so it must be over 100 years old. Kitchen table The kitchen table was finished with shellac so I washed it with methylated spirits and steel wool. The top was the most damaged and I used a cabinet scraper to remove most os the finish. This exposed the old screw holes so I ended up sandins the whole top. Sanding removed some water damage but left the timber looking brand new. I didn't touch the edges other than a light sand. I needed to fill some old screw holes and decided to use wooden plugs. The timber was difficult to identify. In the end I used some red pine as the  grain and colour were close to the original. After more sanding I stained the top with a mahogany stain to bring it closer to the rest of the kitchen table. I applied several coats of shellac to the top and then followed up with three coats to the entire piece. I sanded lightly between coats leaving the final coat. After a week or so I applied beeswax which brought a nice finish. The only other challenge were two of [...]

A Chair for Our Grand Daughter

An old school chair probably form an infant school. I think infant schools are now called junior primary schools. Our Grand Daughter can't even walk yet so I got in early and renovated the chair. Not much to it really a bit of sanding some spray paint and some off cuts of plywood. I shaped the seat with a slight taper front to back and a similar idea on the back rest. Because we are so safety conscious and that hardware is cheaper i used dome nuts on the back. This way little fingers won't be able to fiddle the nuts off the bolts. I added some Loctite threadlocker just to make extra sure I replaced the the stoppers at the end of the legs as well. The new chair stoppers are rubberised so the chaori cannot be pushed about easily.

Baby Chair Repair – Part 2

Following on from part one of this series some of the cleaned up parts required repairing. The baby chairs is constructed from what I think is Tasmanian oak. There wasn't much damage one tenon had broken off a rail. The other parts that are have worn are near the cast iron wheels. I was able to turn a custom dowel to replace the missing tenon. I had thought the tenon was integral to the stretcher so it required drilling to get the bits and pieces out. I even used carving chisels to clean up the stretcher. In the end the repair was successful. The pieces close to the cast iron wheels had splinters missing making the area for the axle holes  weakened. I uses a straight cutting router bit and a router table. I was able to carefully remove the damaged parts. I had some old pieces of Tasmanian Oak on hand that allowed me to make small pieces to replace the damaged parts. The new wood was a good match for the original timber on the baby chair. The other major damage to the baby chair was the tray. The original was a piece of plywood which had become delaminated overtime. I did entertain gluing the original plywood back together. In the end I  made  a new tray from some old plywood I had kept from dismantling old furniture. As with the previous part of this baby chair repair I have a compilation from Animoto.  

Baby Chair Repair – Part 1

We inherited this baby chair when our children were small. It has been sitting around the shed for many years being moved everytime we had a cleanup.Like many older pieces of wooden furniture it has been renovated many times. The baby chair was covered in several layers of paint besides the original varnish finish. I don't know much about its provenance other than it being in one family for  a long time. I did find a manufacturer's label on it from T.H.Brown and Sons. A quick search on Google revealed that  T.H. Brownand sons were a well know Adelaide (South Australia) furniture maker founded in about 1910. They were important enough to be included in the SA Design Museum. Their products were available Australia wide through department stores.I think the baby chair dates from the 1940s or 50s. I haven't made a video of the process however I took a series of photographs and assembled them in Animoto. This is part one of the process stripping the paint pulling it apart and stripping the years of paint of the frame.  

Refurbishing the front bench

I have just refurbished the front bench and i used Animoto to make a short video from the stills that I took. Not much else going on in the woodworking department at the moment. My woodturning station has been dismantled as we are in the process of moving house. On the plus side there is a shed in the new house which may offer more space than I have had now. Here is the video  

By |August 20th, 2014|Categories: Renovating|0 Comments

A capital offence

I have been renovating a so called holiday house over the last ten years it now looks as though it is drawing to a close.  Only  a few small jobs to do and I might just finish in the next 10 years. I have decided to add another category to the site called 'Renovating'. Quite a bit of the woodworking that I do is renovation of one kind or another. I have added a link to a post on my other blog showing the fence capitals that were installed after a 18 month delay. The post can be found  at this blog    

By |April 27th, 2014|Categories: Renovating|Tags: |0 Comments
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