Furniture Repair in Hallsville, TX

Repair and refinishing for Hallsville — for family pieces that have been in the same houses a long time, and for the furniture a busy household wears out.

A town that has been small, then big, then small, then big again

Hallsville has had an unusual life. It moved to meet the railroad in 1869, was a boom town with as many as fifty businesses in the early 1870s, then lost most of it when the Texas and Pacific pushed on to Longview and moved its shops to Marshall. By 1892 the population was down to three hundred. It recovered, incorporated again in 1935, and had a single traffic light until 2003. It has six now.

Furniture survives that kind of history in a way businesses do not. Families stayed through the quiet decades and the pieces stayed with them, which is why a lot of what comes to us from Hallsville has been in the same house for three or four generations.

Six sawmills once stood here

In 1884 this town of about six hundred people had three churches, six sawmills and six grist mill-gins. Timber was what Hallsville did, and a good deal of the older furniture around here was made locally out of what those mills cut — solid, plain, heavier than it needs to be, and built by somebody who was not thinking about a warranty.

Those pieces are a pleasure to work on. They come apart properly, the timber is better than anything you can buy now at a sensible price, and a repair done well will hold for another lifetime.

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. Pieces somebody has already tried to fix once with the wrong glue, which is a job in itself and nothing to apologize for.

What to leave alone

On a genuinely old piece the original finish is part of what it is worth, and stripping it cannot be undone. Cleaning, waxing and careful touching-in is often the better job and always the cheaper one. Where something is marked in a way that looks deliberate or personal, we will ask before removing it, because that is not our call to make.

Thirty-five minutes down Highway 80

The shop is in Kilgore, about thirty-five minutes west of Hallsville. We collect and return rather than expecting you to move a wardrobe. Start with a photo on your phone — usually enough to say whether it is a simple fix or a bigger job, and roughly what it runs.

Questions we get from Hallsville