Furniture Restoration in Turlock, California

Turlock furniture arrives from bigger rooms than Modesto furniture does. The town's older housing stock — the ranch houses off Geer and Lander, the deep-lot places out toward Denair and Hilmar — was built around dining rooms that seated a working family and everyone who showed up at harvest. So we get the long tables, the eight and ten chair sets, the sideboards nobody wants to lift, and hutches tall enough that the crown has to come off before the piece goes through a doorway.

The second Turlock signature is Portuguese and Swedish heritage furniture. Turlock's dairy families brought pieces with them or had them built here in the same style, and those pieces show up with painted detail, carved edges and hardware you cannot buy at a store. Work on them is conservative by default: keep the original colour and the original hardware unless there is a reason not to.

Faded top, dark leaves. A dining table lives under a window for thirty years and the leaves live in a closet. Pull the leaves out for Thanksgiving and there are two different tables in the room. This is a colour problem, not a damage problem, and it is corrected across the whole top rather than by darkening the leaves.

Oiled finishes that were never fed. A lot of Valley oak was oiled rather than lacquered. Left dry for years, the surface goes grey and chalky and takes stains straight into the fibre. Cleaning and re-oiling brings most of it back; where a mark has gone into the wood, it comes out at the sanding stage or it gets colour-corrected.

Chair joints that lost the fight with a hard floor. Farm chairs get dragged, and dragging works a joint loose from the side. A chair that rocks has to come apart, have the old glue cleaned out of both the tenon and the socket, and be re-clamped square. Glue squeezed into a wobbling joint holds for one season.

Fifteen miles matters less than what happens at each end. A hutch that has to be walked down two steps and around a stair rail is the risky part of the job, not the freeway. When you call, tell us the doorways, the steps and whether there is a truck-sized space out front — that is the information that decides how a piece gets wrapped and who comes with it.

Because we move pianos as our other trade, the equipment for the awkward lifts is already on the truck. It is the same crew and the same blankets whether the object is a spinet or a marble-topped washstand.

Every Turlock piece gets the same first hour: identify the finish, test where it will not show, check whether the top is solid or veneered, and find out how much of the structure is original. Only then is there a plan. Sometimes that plan is smaller than the owner expected — a clean, a wax and two loose joints — and we will say so rather than sell a full strip.

When a full restoration is right, the order is fixed: strip by hand, repair structure and veneer, replace missing parts from matching stock, colour, then build the finish in coats and rub it out. Upholstery for dining chairs is done in the same shop, so a set leaves together. The longer version of all of this lives on the furniture restoration page, and if what you need is structural only, the furniture repair page covers that. Tables specifically are on the table restoration page.

Do you collect from Turlock, or do I drive the piece up to Modesto?

Either. Highway 99 puts you about fifteen miles from the shop on Maze Blvd, and we run trucks daily for piano and furniture moves, so adding a Turlock collection to a route is routine. If you would rather bring it yourself, a pickup bed and a couple of blankets is usually enough for a dresser or a set of chairs.

My table came out of a Turlock ranch house and the leaves do not match the top any more. Can that be evened out?

Yes, and it is one of the more common things we correct. Leaves that lived in a closet kept their original colour while the top faded in daylight. Colour is built back in stages across the whole surface so the table reads as one piece with the leaves in or out.

It is oiled oak, not lacquered. Does that change anything?

It changes the whole method. Oiled and waxed surfaces are cleaned and re-fed rather than stripped and sprayed, and putting a film finish over an oiled piece without proper preparation is how finishes end up peeling. We check what is actually on the wood before anything is decided.

Can you match a missing chair or a broken spindle from an old Turlock dining set?

Broken and missing parts are turned or cut from matching stock in the shop and coloured to blend. A whole missing chair is a different question and depends on the pattern, but a spindle, a stretcher, a drawer runner or a piece of trim is ordinary bench work.

The piece is huge. Do you handle the lifting?

That is the part we are unusually good at — moving pianos is the other half of this business. Sideboards, hutches, armoires and eight-foot harvest tables get wrapped and carried by people who do it every week.

Nixon's Oak Tree House has been family-owned in Modesto since 1991. The people who look at your piece are the people who work on it, and you will talk to the same person from the first phone call to the day it goes back in your dining room. Finished work is on the Before & Afters page. To get started, call (209) 524-6349 or request an estimate and tell us the piece, the wood if you know it, and what is wrong with it.