Furniture Repair in Kilgore, TX

Bringing tired, damaged and handed-down furniture back to life. The shop is here in Kilgore, so you can bring the piece by rather than describing it down the phone.

Kilgore furniture is older than most people realize

Most of this town went up in a hurry. The East Texas Oil Field came in during the autumn of 1930 and Kilgore went from a declining cotton community to a boomtown within days — thousands of people, tents and shacks in every vacant lot, and eventually more than a thousand producing wells inside the city limits. The director of the Kilgore Public Library has put it plainly: the town's golden age was the boom, so a great many of its homes and buildings date from the 1930s and forties, and the town restores them where it can.

The decades after the boom, roughly the forties through the sixties, produced the largest share of Kilgore's housing. Which means a typical house here is somewhere between sixty and ninety-five years old, and the furniture inside it often arrived with the house or with the family. Dining tables, chests, wardrobes, pie safes, chairs that were somebody's mother's. That is the work that comes through this shop.

Why wood moves the way it does here

Gregg County is humid, and it swings. The earliest boom-era houses were mostly pier and beam, and their crawl spaces have been breathing East Texas damp for eighty-odd years. Wood in those rooms takes up moisture in summer and gives it back in winter, which is why drawers stick in July and rattle in January, why a table top that was flat in the spring has a cup in it by August, and why old glue joints let go.

None of that means a piece is finished. It means it is doing what wood does. Most of the time the fix is adjustment and re-gluing rather than replacement, and it costs a fraction of what people expect.

What we take on

Loose and broken joints, chairs that rock, drawers that bind or drop, veneer that has lifted or chipped, water rings, heat marks, sun-faded tops, split boards, missing trim and moldings, and complete strip-and-refinish work where the old finish is genuinely past saving. Structural repairs to beds, dressers and cabinets. Church pews, which come up more often round here than you would think.

Refinishing is not always the right answer

Stripping a piece back is sometimes exactly the wrong call. An original finish, even a tired one, is part of what an older piece is worth, and once it is off it never comes back. On a genuinely old piece, cleaning and reviving what is there is often the better job — and the cheaper one. We will say so if that is the case, even though it is less work for us.

How to start

Start with a photo on your phone. That is usually enough to say whether something is a straightforward fix or a bigger job, and roughly what it runs. Nothing gets started before you know the number. If you are in Kilgore you can simply bring it by — Monday to Friday, nine to five.

Questions we get from Kilgore

Do not leave it too long

A loose joint gets worse every time somebody sits on it. A lifted edge of veneer catches on a sleeve and tears further. The repairs that turn expensive are almost always the ones that were small a year ago. If something is wobbling, it is cheaper today than it will be next spring.