Furniture Repair in Longview, TX

Repairing and refinishing furniture for Longview homes — the pieces that came with the house, came from family, or came out of a downtown antique shop.

Longview's old neighborhoods keep old furniture in them

Longview's 2016 historic resource survey mapped where the age in this town actually sits: the original Hundred Acre townsite, the South Main district just below it, White City, and the industrial blocks of the Junction. Those streets hold Prairie School houses, brick homes from the early years, and at least one frame I-house on Teague Street thought to predate the founding of Longview itself.

Houses like that tend to hold onto their furniture. Pieces get left behind by one owner and inherited by the next, or handed down through a family that never left Gregg County. That is most of what comes through this shop from Longview — not things people bought last year, but things they would be sorry to lose.

What usually needs doing

Chairs that rock because a joint has let go. Drawers that bind, drop or refuse to close square. Veneer that has lifted at an edge or blistered on a top. Water rings and heat marks. Sun-faded tops where a piece has sat in a bay window for thirty years. Split boards and cracked legs. Missing moldings and trim that need cutting to match rather than ordering. Full strip-and-refinish work when the old finish is genuinely done.

Beds, dressers, wardrobes, dining chairs and church pews are the regulars. So are pieces somebody has already tried to fix once with the wrong glue, which is a job in itself and nothing to be embarrassed about.

Gregg County weather is hard on furniture

This county is humid and it swings. Wood in an older house takes on moisture through the summer and gives it back in winter, and it moves every time. That is why the drawer that ran fine in April sticks in August, why a table top that was flat has a slight cup in it by the end of the season, and why hide glue that has held for eighty years finally lets go.

None of that means the piece is finished. It means it is behaving like wood. The fix is usually adjustment and re-gluing rather than replacement, and it costs a fraction of what most people brace themselves for.

Sometimes the answer is to leave the finish alone

Stripping a piece back is not automatically an improvement. On something genuinely old, the original finish is part of what it is worth, and once it is off it does not come back. A clean, a wax and some careful touching-in often looks better than a full refinish and costs a good deal less. We will say so when that is the case, even though it is less work for us.

Getting a piece to us from Longview

The shop is in Kilgore, about twenty minutes down Highway 259, so collection and return is a short run rather than a day out. 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 starts before you have a real number.

Questions we get from Longview