Repairing & Restoring Chairs: Professional Techniques to Bring Your Furniture Back to Life

This book presents professional techniques to bring your furniture back to life. How to dismantle, reassemble, repair, restore, upholster, polish, wax and stain antique chairs at home. It includes clear step-by-step instructions for everyday restoration tasks, including upholstering a stuff-over seat, repairing feet and legs, and mending a broken back. It features a fascinating history, including how chairs from different periods are made, and how to take them apart and put them back together. It includes expert advice on buying, using and caring for tools, equipment and materials. It offers projects that include restoring an 18th-century carved chair, replacing a dog-chewed arm, repairing a top rail, cutting in a tenon joint, and reeding a turned chair leg. It contains over 400 specially commissioned photographs. This book is an essential guide to basic and advanced restoration techniques for antique chairs. Information is given on how each piece of furniture is constructed, and how it can be dismantled and reassembled. There is a section on all the tools and equipment needed for home furniture repair, followed by practical projects such as removing upholstery, French polishing, repairing a broken arm, and restoring a scuffed foot. With its historical overview, professional instructions and more than 400 photographs, this book will enable any budding restorer to develop a true understanding of a range of antique chairs, and how to repair and restore them.