Grace Woodwork
Repair and restoration for Henderson — a town older than the state of Texas, with the furniture to match.
The town was laid out in 1843, two years before Texas became a state, and named for James Pinckney Henderson, who went on to be its first governor. Fire took most of the business district in 1860. The railroad arrived in the 1870s and the ornate brick buildings still standing downtown went up after that. The commercial district has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1986.
Nineteen historical markers sit in this town, including antebellum houses and homes dating from the 1880s, and three recorded Texas historic landmark homes — the Howard-Dickinson House, the M. Kangerga House and the T. J. Walling Log Cabin. Houses of that age hold furniture of that age, and it is a genuinely different job from a mid-century piece.
The older a piece is, the more the original surface matters and the less forgiving the work becomes. Nineteenth-century furniture was put together with hide glue, cut joinery and hand-planed surfaces, and modern adhesives and machine sanding can do damage that cannot be undone. Hide glue is reversible on purpose; a piece repaired the old way can be taken apart and repaired again in fifty years, which is the entire reason those pieces have survived this long.
So on genuinely old furniture, the first question is always how little we can get away with doing. Cleaning, waxing and careful touching-in beats a full strip more often than people expect, and it protects what the piece is worth.
The 1930 discovery of the East Texas field took Henderson from around two thousand people to over ten thousand in a matter of months, and threw up a whole second stratum of building. When the boom ended in the early forties the population settled back near six and a half thousand, but twenty-eight manufacturing and service businesses stayed and kept the town going.
What that leaves is two quite separate kinds of furniture in one town: pre-statehood and Victorian pieces in the old houses, and 1930s and 40s furniture in everything built during the rush. They need different treatment, and knowing which one is in front of you is most of the job.
Loose and broken joints. Drawers that bind, drop or sit crooked. Lifted and blistered veneer, which is common on the boom-era pieces because the veneer of that period was thin and the glue was not. Water rings, heat marks and sun-faded tops. Split boards and cracked legs. Missing moldings cut to match rather than ordered. Chairs re-glued and clamped properly rather than screwed and hoped over.
The shop is in Kilgore, about twenty-five minutes north of Henderson, so collection and return is straightforward. Start with a photo on your phone. That is usually enough to say whether something is a simple fix or a bigger job, and roughly what it runs — and nothing starts until you have a real number.
We will tell you what we can see — the joinery, the glue, the timber and the tool marks say a lot. Where a piece looks valuable enough that it should be appraised before anything is done to it, we will say that rather than start work.
It can, and on a genuinely old piece the original finish is part of what it is worth. We will recommend the lightest thing that solves your problem.
Yes. It is about twenty-five minutes from the Kilgore shop.
It depends entirely on the piece, so nothing is quoted sight unseen. Send a photo and you will get a real number.
The shop is in Kilgore and we travel from here — as far as Lufkin when the job is worth the drive.
A phone picture is plenty. We will tell you what it needs, what it will cost and roughly how long it will take — before you commit to anything.
Send a photo