How to Restore Vintage Furniture

Video Transcript

"From time to time we'll have someone come in the store and their question is how do I restore my mother's antique whatever. At Cape Fear Antique center, we do antique restoration. We do refinishing of items up through really the sixties. When a customer requests that, we don't arbitrarily look for that business, but we don't turn it away a lot either. I always suggest to folks that the first thing you want to do is look around at the merchandise that is for sale in a given store. If you like what you see and they've done the restoration work then you are probably going to like what they do for you when they've restored your mother's heirloom dining room table for instance. You want references, you want some point of safety, understanding that you are turning over a piece that is important to you even if it's not valuable and that the people that you are turning it's care to are going to treat it to the best of their ability and give you back a product that is going to look as beautiful hopefully as the day it was made when your mother or your grandmother put it in their home for the first time. We do suggest, there are products on the market that you can use for cleaning antiques and to try to delay a refinishing situation. You can try those yourself with some degree of success in most instances. But if it reaches a point where a piece needs to be stripped and redone, turn to a professional and let someone who knows what they are doing because if the piece is old enough to warrant being restored then you want it to be done properly."