Furniture Repair in Gilmer, TX

Repair and restoration for Gilmer and Upshur County — for the pieces that came down through a family and are not replaceable at any price.

An old county town, with the furniture that goes with one

Gilmer was founded in 1848 on the Cherokee Trace and has been the seat of Upshur County ever since. It was a cotton-ginning town first — six gins running at one point, one of them still going into the 1950s — before sweet potatoes and then oil came through. There are more than fifty historical markers in and around the county, and the Historic Upshur Museum sits on the square in the old 1925 post office.

A town that has been continuously settled that long, without the population churn of a boom city, keeps its furniture in families. What comes to us from Gilmer is rarely something bought recently. It is a grandmother's chest, a dining table that has been in the same house through three generations, a chair that somebody's father made. Those are worth repairing almost regardless of what the repair costs, and that is usually why people call.

Sentiment changes the job, and that is fine

A piece that matters because of who owned it is a different job from a piece that matters because of what it is worth. Sometimes the marks are the point — the ring where somebody always set a cup down, the height scratched into a door frame. We will ask before removing anything like that, because it cannot be put back and it is not our call to make.

Equally, sentiment is not a reason to accept a bad repair. A chair that is only sat in twice a year still has to be safe to sit in, and a table that a family eats at should not be held together with a bracket somebody screwed on in 1974.

What comes in

Loose and broken joints. Chairs that rock or have given way at the back. Drawers that bind, drop or sit crooked. Lifted and blistered veneer. Water rings, heat marks and sun-faded tops. Split boards and cracked legs. Missing moldings and turned parts cut to match. Replacement runners and glides. And a steady run of pieces somebody has already tried to fix once with the wrong glue, which is a job in itself and nothing to apologize for.

Wood moves out here

Upshur County gets the same humid summers and dry winters as the rest of East Texas, and wood in an unairconditioned room — a back bedroom, a porch, a barn — moves further than most people realize. Drawers that ran fine in April bind in August. Table tops cup. Old hide glue finally lets go after eighty years of it. That is wood behaving normally, and the fix is usually adjustment and re-gluing rather than replacement.

Thirty-five minutes from the shop

The shop is in Kilgore, about thirty-five minutes south of Gilmer. We collect and return rather than expecting you to move a wardrobe in the back of a truck. Start with a photo — that is usually enough to say whether it is a simple fix or a bigger job, and roughly what it runs, before anything is committed to.

Questions we get from Gilmer