Furniture repair and restoration in Nairobi

This is the smallest-ticket work on this site, at roughly KES 8,000 to 30,000 a piece, and it is the work that best demonstrates whether somebody can actually do carpentry. Anyone can screw new boards together. Taking a hundred-year-old chair apart without breaking it, and putting it back so the repair does not show, is a different skill.

Our lead carpenter has been doing it for forty-three years. furniture repair measures 20 searches a month in Kenya at an advertising competition index of 0, which tells you how few people are contesting it.

What is worth repairing

Almost all old furniture. Pieces made before about 1960 are generally solid timber with joined construction, which means they were designed to be taken apart and reassembled. A wobbly Victorian chair usually needs its joints cleaned and re-glued, not replacing, and it will then outlast anything you could buy new.

Almost no modern flat-pack. Particle board with cam fixings cannot be repaired in any meaningful sense: once the board around a fixing has crumbled, there is nothing to fix to. We will tell you that rather than take your money.

Anything with sentimental value, within reason, and we will be honest about what a repair will and will not look like.

What we do

• Loose and broken joints. The commonest job by far. A chair that rocks has dried-out glue in its mortices; the fix is to dismantle, clean out the old glue completely, and re-glue. Squirting fresh glue into a loose joint without cleaning it is the standard bad repair and it lasts a few months.
• Broken and missing components. Turning a replacement leg or spindle to match the others, which is where matching the species and grain direction decides whether you can see it.
• Veneer repair. Lifted, bubbled or missing veneer, patched with matching material laid with the grain running the same way.
• Water marks and heat rings. White rings are usually in the finish rather than the timber and often come out without stripping the whole surface.
• Rot and insect damage, including cutting out and splicing in sound timber. In Nairobi this is a real problem in furniture stored in an outbuilding.
• Refinishing, from a light revival to a full strip and rebuild of the finish.

Restoration or refinishing, which are not the same

Worth deciding before we start, because they point in opposite directions.

Restoration aims to keep as much original material and original finish as possible, because on an antique the patina is a large part of the value and it cannot be put back. Stripping an original finish off a genuinely old piece can reduce what it is worth considerably.

Refinishing aims to make the piece look good now. On a much-loved but unremarkable table that is exactly right.

We will ask which you want and say which we think the piece deserves. If we think a piece is valuable enough that it should go to a specialist restorer rather than to us, we will say that too.

Upholstery

We do frame repairs, which is the part that is carpentry: a sofa that sags because its frame has broken needs the frame fixing, and re-covering it without that is money wasted. The covering itself goes to an upholsterer, and we will happily work alongside one rather than pretend it is our trade.