Furniture Repair in Arp, TX

Furniture repair for Arp and the Lake Tyler shoreline — including the particular damage that comes from a place being shut up all winter.

Damp does its own kind of damage

Lake Tyler and Lake Tyler East lie immediately west of Arp, and the shoreline is full of camps and houses that get used hard for four months and closed up for the rest. Furniture in a building like that suffers in ways town furniture never does, and the owner usually finds out all at once when they open up in the spring.

Joints let go, because hide glue and even modern adhesives lose their hold when timber has been swelling and shrinking through every damp cycle. Veneer lifts and blisters. Drawers that ran fine in September will not open. Cane and rush seats sag and go brittle. Anything with a fabric seat that was put away slightly damp has bloomed.

Most of it is fixable, and cheaper than the spring instinct

The instinct on opening up a damp house is to throw things out. It is usually the wrong one. A joint that has let go is re-gluable — often more easily than a dry one, because the old glue has already released. Lifted veneer goes back down. A sagging cane seat can be re-woven. A table top that has cupped will frequently come back once the timber has stabilised in normal conditions, which sometimes means the right answer is to bring it inland for a few weeks and do nothing at all.

We would rather tell you that than charge you for work the weather will undo.

Porch and outdoor furniture

Screened porches are where the lake actually gets used, and they are hard on furniture. Sun through the screen, damp overnight, and a season of wet swimsuits. Timber porch furniture is worth repairing rather than replacing, because what is sold to replace it is usually worse — thin sections, stapled joints and a finish that will not last two summers.

Rockers, gliders, porch swings, picnic tables and benches all come through this shop. So do pieces that somebody has already screwed a bracket onto, which is nothing to apologize for.

Finishes for a building nobody heats

Refinishing a piece that lives at the lake is a different specification. An oil finish that can be topped up beats a hard film finish that cracks and traps moisture underneath, and every face gets sealed including the undersides and the backs — which is exactly where cheaper work leaves timber raw and where damp gets in first.

In town

Arp itself is a small farming town of under a thousand people, a railroad stop once called Jarvis Switch with a post office named Strawberry before it was renamed after a newspaper editor. Ordinary household repairs from there are just as welcome, and one chair is a perfectly normal job.

How to start

Send a photo. If it is a lake place and you have just opened up for the season, photograph everything at once rather than one piece at a time — the same cause is usually behind all of it, and it is cheaper to deal with together.

Questions we get from Arp