Antique Oak Wardrobe
In late July, we were commissioned and assign to refinish and repair an antique oak wardrobe. When the client delivered it to my shop it was knocked down into the various subassemblies with different channels and partitions. They consisted of some base with two drawers, two cabinet cases with doors attached, a center frame and panel assembly, and a cornice unit attached together. This antique oak wardrobe was built by a company that’s no longer in existence in their city, which is a bad news for the owners. Now they don’t have many options to repair them properly. Somehow they take antique oak wardrobe to me. The wardrobe was really in a rough shape and had a very much darker finish than my client liked. His instructions were very clear that he wants to lighten the finish and repair what I could do with the best of our ability.
There were a lot of problem that needed to repair, which included the pulls on the doors and drawers that needed to be replaced, splits in both wood panels on both doors, some of the door hinges were either missing or broken, one drawer was missing a brass escutcheon and had a split in one corner of a side, the base was missing a piece of one end panel and the panel on the other end was split in several places, the cornice unit had gaps in both miter joints and nail heads that had popped out, the cabinet cases were missing a number of wooden cleats that served to position them with the base and the cornice unit, one case had a split frame member on the interior, both cases wobbled and needed to be tightened, there were scratches and what appeared to be paint marks inside of both cases, and the client didn’t like the panel in the center panel assembly and wanted something made to replace it.
As far as the finish was concerned, it had to be stripped. We have to really work up to this part in term of maintenance because reliability is the most important thing. They really want to utilize this for their personal use also. The important task in front of us is to repair this as its looks new to them. This was one of the most challenging refinishing and repair projects I’ve encountered so far. Fortunately for me, my client was very easy to work with and left many of the decisions to my discretion. Follow along by checking out the links below to see this project from beginning to end. I think the end results were stunning and there’s no doubt my client was very pleased once he saw it finished.