Furniture Restoration in Ceres, California

More furniture reaches us from Ceres by way of a garage than by way of a living room. A dresser goes out there during a remodel, a hope chest gets stacked behind the water heater, a dining set waits for a house that never quite had room for it — and a decade passes.

Unconditioned storage leaves a recognisable set of problems: veneer lifting at the edges, drawers that have swollen and seized, hardware gone green, and a finish that has bloomed cloudy. Almost all of it is fixable. The one thing worth hurrying is structural — once glue joints let go completely, a piece starts to rack, and racking breaks things that were fine.

The other steady stream from Ceres is painted furniture. Someone in the eighties painted a good oak dresser white, or a bedroom set got a coat of enamel to match a wall colour, and now a grandchild wants the wood back.

That is a stripping job. It is done by hand, with the method chosen for what is underneath — a thin shellac over solid oak is not treated like layered enamel over veneer. What comes off matters less than what is left intact when it does.

Photographs are useful, and we take plenty of them by phone. But some things are decided with hands on the wood: how far a joint moves, whether a top is veneer or solid, how deep a water stain has travelled, whether a leg is original.

Because Ceres is a short drive from our shop on Maze Blvd, we can look at a dining set in your house rather than guessing at it, and handing a chair over does not cost you half a day.

Ceres runs along the Tuolumne on its north side, and the yearly swing from damp winter mornings to a long dry summer is hard on old furniture. Wood moves, joints open at the seams, veneer releases at the edge, and hide glue that has held for eighty years eventually gives up.

The answer is not fresh glue over failed glue. Joints come apart, get cleaned back to bare wood, then are re-glued and clamped so the piece is genuinely solid. Veneer is laid back down or patched with matching stock rather than filled. It takes longer and it holds.

Someone painted my oak dresser white. Can the oak come back?

Usually. Paint over hardwood is a stripping job, and stripping is something this shop does every week. What we cannot promise before seeing it is what the previous owner did to the wood underneath the paint.

A piece has been in the garage for years. Is it too far gone?

Rarely. Lifted veneer, seized drawers, green hardware and a bloomed finish are all normal garage damage and all fixable. The thing to avoid is waiting until the joints let go completely.

Can you come look at a dining set that is too big to bring in?

Yes. Ceres is minutes from the shop, so looking at a piece in your house is practical here in a way it is not for a distant town.

Do you match a repair to the rest of a set?

That is much of the skill. Colour is built in stages and checked against the other pieces, so a repaired chair does not sit at the table announcing itself.

Assessment first, then stripping by hand, structural and veneer repair, colour matched where it is needed, and a finish built in coats and rubbed out rather than sprayed and rushed. Upholstery is done in house. The longer explanation is on the furniture restoration page, and finished pieces are on the Before & Afters page.

Nixon's Oak Tree House has been owned and run by the same Modesto family since 1991. Call (209) 524-6349 or request an estimate.