Upcoming Projects - Inlaid Maple Desk & Antique Walnut Secretary

Those of you who've been following the blog for a while will remember that I've been tolerating using a rickety old card table as a temporary computer desk since I moved here in 2010. I hate this setup, but I've been looking for a nicer table for a while, and nothing had turned up until recently (a month or two ago).

This little table, probably from the 50s or 60s was in the nearby Salvation Army Thrift Store, and was priced at 30$, so I couldn't resist buying it. It wasn't exactly what I had in mind, but was good enough for now.



What attracted me to this particular table was the inlay on the top, as well as the size (which is exactly the size I wanted for the room).

The large centre panel of veneer appears to be 1/4 sawn maple or beech, with a beautiful band of ebony, walnut and maple around it.



As-is, the table has two leaves on the ends that pop out on an unusual spring loaded mechanism. Although the leaves could be handy to have, I really hate how sloppily they sit when not in use, and how incredibly bulky they make the top of the table look.





I'm planning to remove the leaves and mechanism, keeping just the plain top, but this will leave me with two holes on each end board (photo above). I'm not sure if I want to just patch them with "removable plugs", or completely eliminate them by sawing off the top halves of the end boards and adding new maple boards there (and sanding/finish to blend it). I kind of hate to permanently modify the table. I may just end up keeping this table temporarily (I still want a fancy mahogany one with 2 drawers).

Here's how the table looks without the leaves (everything just unscrews):



The table will obviously need to be refinished, and the little drawer also needs new runners (one is broken, and the other is questionable).

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I also have a small update on the beautiful old walnut desk/secretary. I was able to find some reproduction handles in a very similar pattern to the originals. These come in very limited patterns and styles (Eastlake/Victorian ring pulls) and they generally sell for around 6-12$ per handle. I did some extensive internet sleuthing and although these same handles are sold by dozens of hardware companies, some did not sell to Canada, and some had overly inflated shipping charges. In the end, I was very fortunate to come across one company that had them on clearance, and they were around 2$ each, with very reasonable shipping to Canada. All told, the set of 9 (they had only 9 in stock, and I may or may not need one for the drop down lid) cost me something around 40$ total!

The back plates are the same size as the originals, but the rings are larger. They also happen to be solid brass, which is even better than the brass-plated originals (but the originals are definitely staying). Once they darken, they will look great!

News! Tons of Neat New Stuff

Alright, lots of interesting and exciting things to discuss today! I have over 75 new photos to share!

Upholstery News:

First, I started a new blog for all the upholstery. There's just too many interesting and beautiful pieces that we've been working on, and I don't want to flood my "old house blog" with all the upholstery photos, so that's all being moved to the new blog "Lefebvre's Upholstery". That blog will be updated frequently with some of the better/bigger projects we're working on (we don't bother to post, or even photograph, the more mundane items like vinyl boat seats and chair repairs). I hope all of you who find upholstery to be fascinating, or who just love to see some rather dramatic "before and After" photos will enjoy following that blog. You can find it here:

Lefebvre's Upholstery Blog

I currently have 54 new upholstery photos that will be posted shortly, plus the reposts of the ones I already showed on this blog. If there isn't anything up on the blog yet, just be patient with me, and check back tomorrow.

Foursquare News:

I bought some furniture!

Well, that's a bit of an understatement since I walked away with 14 pieces of furniture, consisting of an entire matched 12 piece dining room set in mahogany, plus two freebies: a leather top (mahogany) coffee table, and an upholstered (beaten-up and falling apart) Eastlake style Victorian chair.

I saw the set advertised locally through Kijiji, and it only had 4 small photos, with a 500$ asking price. I could see one of the chairs poking out from the edge of a photo, and the table with 8 chairs seemed worth the asking price on their own. The set also came with a glass-door china hutch, a large sideboard, and another cabinet.

I contacted the seller (who was conveniently 2 blocks away on 4th street - note: I'm on 5th), and made plans to have a look at the set on Thursday night. I was very excited when I saw it, and that's when the owner also offered me the coffee table and Victorian chair "free if you want them". He also said he could deliver it (SWEET!!!)

I wanted to post about it on Thursday night or Friday, but I didn't want to jinx anything and I waited until today.

I spent all morning and part of Friday cleaning up all the clutter and junk around the house and in the garage to make the place look half decent, and to clear some room. This morning I moved my old chairs to the basement, and dismantled the crappy old table I had.

Dining Room ready for the new arrivals!



The chairs (before taking them inside from the garage):



Ta-Dah!



Hutch:



I started to really look over the set, and I noticed quite a few nice details. One of the signs of a high-end set is that the back legs on the larger pieces (sideboard, hutch, etc) are carved/turned. Many of the more basic sets usually have plain back legs.

Next, the drawers. Wow. Not only are they well made, but this is the first time I've seen internal drawers that are made with 1/4 sawn White Oak. For those who don't know, quarter sawn lumber is when the wood is cut radially through the tree (think pie wedges). This means that the grain running through the board is running perpendicular to the board (stripes as opposed to curved lines when you look at the end of a board). This causes a lot of waste, but the wood is more stable, less likely to warp, and it's also the only way to see those beautiful "tiger stripes" that are present in all pieces of Oak. Regular "flat sawn" wood will have shallow curves in the wood grain, and they're more likely to cup/warp, but it's much cheaper and easier to do. Almost all the solid wood furniture you'll see today is flat sawn.



Then there's the dovetails. Most people know that dovetails are good, and a lot of older stuff will have them (machine cut or hand cut are equally good). These drawers not only have dovetails at the front...



But also at the back! This is something that you will RARELY see. NONE of my other antiques have this with the exception of my little mahogany night stand (which has just one drawer).



When I had first seen the set I thought it was all Walnut (which is very typical for this style of 1920s set) but when I looked at it in the light, I could see that it's mahogany. All of the legs and mouldings are solid mahogany, and the sides/tops are mahogany veneer.



With all these signs of quality, I was incredibly surprised to find that there were absolutely NO markings on the pieces except for pencilled numbers. Some of the chairs are numbered "9310" and the smaller cabinet is numbered "9312".



From what I can tell, it says "9312 Bottom" "Nov 5 1945" "RossKerr" and something along the lines of: "Like is nany Chuck" (?) These were the only markings I could find.





I had thought that the pink and gold-green fabric on the seats was original, but one of the torn ones proved otherwise.

The fabric is actually dark pinkish red, with the green added afterwards. In some of the excessively worn-out places, the bright pink shows through a lot. The green stripes almost look like ribbons. It's quite an interesting/nice fabric and it goes well with the set.





Here's that other piece. I don't have room for this one, so it will be used in another room.



Now, my final thoughts on the set: It's kind of big. I was surprised how much space the table takes up with the chairs. I will have to rearrange the pieces, because currently the sideboard is so deep on that side that I can't even open a drawer half way, or pull-out a chair properly. The table is off-centre from the room by 4" (because the window and light fixture are 4" off) so it might work better on the opposite side (since I'll gain that 4"). Worst case scenario is that I have to "get rid of" (move to another room) the sideboard. I don't really understand why it's so deep in the first place. It's about 21" deep, while the hutch is only 17" deep.

Then there's the freebies. The chair has definitely seen better days.

The fabrics don't even match, and the upholstery job on the seat is just terrible. Look at all the creases and bunching on the right corner, and on the back left side.







Pierre tells me that the greenish gold velvet isn't original because it's textured velvet.



Note the crack in the stretcher below. The whole chair is rickety and falling apart. The finish isn't the best either, but it has potential to be really nice. The casters have brass wheels.



The coffee table. This one I'm not too fussy about, but I love the cute little casters with the square tips. The table looks like solid mahogany (no veneers), and the top might be leather. It looks and feels like it's fake, but there's a deep gouge in it at one end, and it seems fuzzy, so it could be real leather.

Note broken corner moulding.



The finish on it is in horrible shape (both the wood, and the thick varnish coating over the leather).



That's it for now, but I also had some houses/buildings I'll be posting soon.

A Great Find!

Look what I scored off Kijiji*! I usually just quickly browse the adds every so often, and I spotted this great little mahogany table for only 15$!

It had a few deep chips to the finish on the top, and some light scratches to the legs, but I fixed those in just a few minutes with coloured wax (for the chips) and a touch-up marker (legs). Otherwise it's in absolutely perfect shape. It's not a true antique piece from the 1800's, but it's a very well made reproduction, probably from the early 1900s (maybe 1930s?) The top is a veneer/plywood, but you can't tell unless you really know what to look for. The legs and pedestal are very well made, with no cracks or loose joints. I think they refer to these as a "snake foot". The varnish (which looks like very thick shellac) is all crackled but I like it this way.

Overall, an absolutely amazing little table (19" x 29" and 18" high) for only 15$. I'll use it as an end table in the living room. The best part: it was literally just one block away from my house (it was on 6th street and I'm on 5th street).







I was really excited to post it, since I picked it up just last night, but the lighting was bad and I wanted decent photos of it.

* Kijiji is a classifieds website. It's just like Craigslist, but no one in Cornwall uses Craigslist. I often browse for antiques, tools, or home reno materials.

Antique Table, L Room Ceiling, & Cornwall Homes 4

Antique Table:

Alright, so I took a closer look at the table. While it doesn't have hand forged hinges, it still has plenty of quirks. One of the first things I looked at, was to compare the turned legs. Often, on older pieces, they will be hand turned. On later pieces they would be done on a copy lathe, or by very skilled craftsmen who could duplicate them very precisely. This set, however, is mind bogglingly (and charmingly) inaccurate. I am not the best at making matched sets by hand, but even I can't understand how they messed this up THIS much.

One leg in particular is quite a bit "off". So much so, that if the leaf is down on that side, the legs look mismatched. See here:



Three of the legs are done like the one on the right, but the one on the left is the "bad" one. The reason I can't understand why they messed it up so bad, is that usually when you make multiples of a pattern, you make yourself a "story stick", which is sort of a pattern that marks all the start/stop locations of each major element on your turned item. Obviously they didn't do this. But like I said: it's a bit charming this way.

L Room Ceiling:

Alright. I've been dreading this job for months, and I wasn't sure which way I was going to do it, and I finally bit the bullet and did it the "better but unsafe" way, which was to remove the "bad" sheet of drywall and replace it. If you want a refresher as to what was going on with this ceiling, go to this post: . Basically, 90% of the ceiling was scraped of the putty easily (haha not really), except for one section about 4x8. On this section, the mud that they smeared on was completely cemented in place. The reason for this, is that they changed the drywall in this 4x8 section, and they added the textured mud directly over the paper. I had 2 choices for fixing this:

1. Carefully remove the 4x8 section, while trying not to fill the house with hundreds of thousands of possibly asbestos-contaminated dust particles from the attic above.

2. Shim-up the entire ceiling to match-up with the uneven thickness of the replaced sheet and leave it alone since it will all be covered up anyways.

As I just mentioned, I went with option 1.

I was nervous as hell, and I did end up dropping a bunch of insulation dust/particles/crumbs all over the floor, but luckily the 4x8 section had been put up in two 4x4 sections, and I was able to contain most of the mess. For reasons unknown, when they removed/replaced the sheet, they also removed the protective layer of thin cardboard that would have PREVENTED the old insulation from trickling down through the cracks in the t-g ceiling. So as soon as I had the sheet off, and the floor vacuumed, I capped it with vapour barrier plastic and sealed all the seams.

Here's what the open ceiling looks like. It's very wide (7") t-g face-nailed to the attic/ceiling joists (which run the whole length of the house).



All those little white crumbs are particles of the vermiculite insulation.



I only felt safe at this point:



The second section went even better, since I was able to loosen 90% of the sheet, and then lean it down just a bit. Then I was able to just vacuum-up all the loose bits on the sheet before taking it down off the edge of the wall (where the corner tape was holding it like a hinge).





Don't even ask me HOW I got this 4x8 sheet of 3/8" drywall up BY MYSELF without breaking it or killing myself. I'll just say that it was a huge PITA.



I still need a narrow strip to fill that gap where the tape is visible. When it comes to installing the new (1/2") drywall over this mess, I'll be getting some friends to help out.

Cornwall Homes 4:

These were taken this afternoon. We'll start with what I consider to be the nicest foursquare in Cornwall. It is in immaculate condition, and boasts ALL of its original windows, original storm windows, original exterior doors, and even the wooden fascia and trim around the roof line. I love that they accented all the storm windows and secondary doors in a classic forest green.





Just next door (2 houses down) is this fine Victorian with a beautiful enclosed circular porch. This house also has all of its original windows, and beautiful (red) arched front doors (not pictured). I love how this photo looks vintage. It was purely caused by the late afternoon sun.



This is another very nice foursquare. I want to make a door for my porch that is similar to theirs, to complement my porch windows (which are also 4 over 2).



Lastly, this is the grand entrance of a gorgeous apartment building not too far away on one of the main roads. The building has massive fluted columns that span the whole building (3 storeys), and the centre windows are all art deco styled stained glass. The balconies also have nicely detailed wooden railings (which you can partially see on the sides of the photo).