Furniture Restoration in Ceres, California

Ceres starts where south Modesto ends, and our shop on Maze Blvd is a short drive from anywhere in town. For restoration work that convenience is real: you can bring a chair by, we can come see a dining set that is too big to haul, and handing a piece over does not cost you half a day.

It also makes the conversation easier. Photographs are useful, but some things — how a joint moves, whether a top is veneer or solid, how deep a water stain has gone — are better judged with hands on the wood.

Mostly family furniture from long-settled households: dressers and chests with drawers that stick, dining tables with rings and heat marks, chairs that have gone loose, buffets and china cabinets, and the occasional grandfather clock or hope chest that everybody in the family has an opinion about.

Garage-stored pieces are a Ceres specialty. A dresser that has spent a decade in an unconditioned garage off Hatch Road or out past Service Road picks up its own problems — lifted veneer, seized drawers, hardware gone green, sometimes a bloom in the finish. Almost all of it is fixable; the point is to catch it before the joints let go completely.

We also get painted furniture. Somebody in the eighties painted a good oak dresser white, and now a grandchild wants the oak back. That is a stripping job, and stripping is one of the things this shop does every week.

Ceres sits along the Tuolumne River on its north side, and the swing between damp winter mornings and a long dry summer is hard on furniture. Wood moves, joints open, veneer releases at the edges, and old hide glue eventually gives up.

The fix is not more glue on top of failed glue. Joints get taken apart, cleaned back to wood, re-glued and clamped so the piece is solid again. Veneer gets laid back down or patched in with matching stock rather than filled. It takes longer and it lasts.

Assessment first — the wood, the joinery, the finish, and what the piece means to you. Then stripping by hand with methods chosen for what is underneath, repair of structure and veneer, refinishing with color matched where it is needed, and a finish built in coats and rubbed out rather than sprayed on and rushed. Upholstery is done in house when the piece needs it.

The longer explanation, including how to tell a repair from a refinish from a full restoration, is on the furniture restoration page.

Nixon's Oak Tree House has been owned and run by the same family in Modesto since 1991 — about 35 years of Valley furniture. Bob, Jenny and Dick do the looking and the work, and you will hear an honest answer about whether a piece is worth restoring before you hear a price.

See the results on the Before & Afters page, then call (209) 524-6349 or request an estimate.