Basement Rescue - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorham, Maine. This is a nice little roll-top desk because we're calling it a desk but it's more of an accessory piece for an office in that this slides out and it's got these extra side pieces. Maybe it held an adding machine or a stenographer's machine or something. Still has the decal on it, Cutler. They manufactured furniture, a lot of office furniture. They made roll tops from 1882 to 1919. I think this is the latter part of that period. I associate this type of drawer and handle with the early 20th century. This belonged to the owner's father, so it has special meaning to her. Unfortunately, it's been down in the basement but we want to bring it up and bring it in the house where it can be used. So, obviously, we've got to repair the tambours. It has water damage, not too bad, down to the feet here, a crack in the bottom. The back is really bad and the case needs to be re-glued. We may find other things along the way. I'm anxious to get to this back here. Well, I can see that the back is nailed on in a couple of places. I see nails in the top. There's a piece here that goes across that it's nailed to. All these rails and stuff are going to need to be re-glued. I think I just need to start spreading this apart and I got to get the nails out of the top of the back before I can get this out of here. I think there might be some nails in the back in this middle piece, but I think I'd better see if I can get the nails out up here so that I can begin to slide this back out. At least the head of the nail is visible. I'm going to try tapping the other side first, see if I can push it a little bit. Yeah, see it's nailed to a board in here and it's nailed to this board right here, so I'll just tap them a bit easier to do from this position. I'll tap these, see if we can get a little bit of get up on those nails. Yeah, it actually worked. So these nails came out, but there's a board right about here. I thought I'd see evidence of nails. I don't. It must be glued. So I'm going to see if I can just separate this board out of here, get that thing out. I better start marking these. This piece wasn't attached to the back, which is good. I've gotten those nails out. Maybe the back will slide out of there. See, I really don't want to take this top off these side pieces because it's screwed and nailed down through the top, and I don't want to take the plugs out. Oh, I see a couple screws down there. I feel like it's just hanging on by a thread here. Maybe it's stuck in these screws a little bit. Well, it looks like I'm going to have to take those screws out of the top anyway. I was trying to avoid that. See, here are the screws I wanted to get. Well, there's two screws with plugs through here, and then it's nailed in the back apparently. But I was trying to avoid taking these screws out because I don't want to refinish the top. But I'll take them out, replace those plugs, and I'll do it without refinishing. So finally, this is what was holding that back in, these nails. And of course, the back must be glued to this piece, and the back is wedged in there. This is that piece that came off the back of the cabinet at the top. And you may have seen the nail had split the wood, so it's important to glue these slivers back right away. You know, I thought all along I might try to save this plywood, but there's nothing really special about it. I'm just going to cut a new piece. A couple of nails in there. Hopefully this will still pull out. This nail, I've seen this in a few places. I think that's from the factory. Both sides have cracks in the bottom. Let's put a clamp on them and see what happens. It moves together some, but boy, not even close. I'm cranking on this clamp too. It's not going to come together. Same thing on this side. This isn't even close to coming together. So what I decided to do here is I'm going to use West System epoxy. I'm going to color it a similar color to the oak, clamp these together as much as I can, and the epoxy will fill whatever gaps left. You can see I cut a little bridge here in my board that keeps this level so I can clean that joint off. Same routine for the other side. All right, we'll let this dry overnight, and now we can get started on the tambours. All right, the first order of business is to get this off of here. Ah, that's the one I'm looking for. Roll top desk key. Doesn't want to go in there for some reason. It looks like the right key. I wonder if I can access this mechanism from underneath. Luckily there's two screws here. Hey, it wasn't glued. Yay. All right, let's see what we got here. So this is a trap door that when the lid is up, this of course goes flush with the writing surface, and then in here, if you can see it, this is the lock mechanism, which is a rectangular tube, and it's got two spring-loaded pieces that when they enter the space that this trap door fills, they spring out and lock it. See, I've got to be able to bring both these spring-loaded pieces together simultaneously. See, now you can see clearly. And this is that little trap door I was talking about. Now we can lay these out and see what we've got. You know, I've just realized for the first time that these tambour slats have an extra piece of wood screwed to the back of them to hold the fabric down. Interesting. The fabric isn't glued down. It's just held by these, held by these strips. So I'm going to take all these strips off the back of these, and then I'm going to build a jig to hold all these square and together while I reapply fabric. Boy, that's interesting. Strange. These slats have an odd shape to them. They're coved on the edges with a small cove, but then the whole inside edge is coved also. And I realize that that's, in fact, that cove matches the curve where the slat rides. This one's got a crack in it. I'm going to glue that up. I didn't put on the glue pot this morning, so I'll just use yellow glue, which is fine for this. Well, I just realized that these slats that keep the fabric down and ride in the grooves, I didn't allow space for that on these sticks. I think, though, that I can, rather than redo it, I think I can push these down enough and get them started. This is a little bit of a problem. I got to find that original screw hole here. Yeah, I think I'll need to locate each screw hole, you know, through the fabric before I put the slat on. That'll help. Now I just need to tighten down the screws. All right, I still got to add on the bottom piece here. This little strip holds the fabric in. It seems like it might be glued. I might need to use heat to get that loose. First thing I'm going to do is remove the lock, get that out of the way. All right, now I can get back to the case. I've just got to scrape all the glue joints. Little breaks like this. This is where a nail came out of there. It's good to glue these back as they occur, as you notice them. I'll glue this back now before I continue scraping this. And also, while this case is apart, this is a time to address this groove that the tambour runs in. I'm going to clean that out, too, and wax it with an old candle. It's funny, that candle wasn't getting down there the way I wanted it to because it was just breaking up. So I'll take some paste wax. I took a little piece of the gray Scotch-Brite pad, dip it in the wax, and then that got in there really well. I see now there's a stop in the back here. So this comes out until I install the tambours. They'll slide in this way and come around, then the stop goes back in. I'm going to finish up these tambours and try out my strategy for inserting these before I glue up the case. So see, after this is assembled, then you slide the tambours in. All right, for a straightforward little glue-up, I had a little moment there when this was in the wrong place, but I got it straightened out, so that's good. Now I've got to add a piece across the top and a piece across the bottom. All right, now I'm going to go over the drawers. I've got to clean them. I know one of these drawer bottoms needs to be moved. Maybe two of them need to be moved. Usually drawer bottoms are tacked in the back to the back rail. This one isn't. Maybe it just slid. Let's just try tapping it forward. It looks like it was glued. I'm using a couple clamps just to bring the drawer bottom in that final little bit. Now I'm going to wash everything down with a solution of water and bleach. All right, I think next thing is I'm going to attach the top. Okay, the glue is dry. Now I'll sand this area just slightly with some 220. I'm going to seal these areas with a little bit of garnet shellac. All right, I've still got to look at these cracks that I glued up at the bottom. Now there's still a few voids here. Remember, I had tape across here, and then I epoxied from the other side, but there's some places where the epoxy didn't fill I'll burn in my low heat wax sticks. I'll use a marker on these light spots. Oh yeah, I'm glad I turned this on its side. You can see where there used to be a block here. Those blocks were gone because this had clearly sat in a lot of water, and I'm going to make those blocks seem to stop there. I'm going to make blocks that go all the way to the floor. Now I've got to finish these touch-ups on the top. I'm using a perfect brown dye stain. Now I want to fix that stain with a little flat lacquer. All right, now it's time to put this thing back together. Now remember that stop that we took out of there? All right, starting to look like something. All right, now I've got to install the back. Now I'm going to go over it with the beeswax and orange oil polish and some 4-0 steel wool. All right, there you go. Nice little roll top desk. We're calling it a desk for lack of a better word. It's clearly a more of a specialized piece of furniture made for some maybe a specific type of equipment. It opens up. If you remember, it was down in the basement for a long time, had a lot of water damage to the back, the sides. I stabilized these sides and filled them in. The tambours had collapsed. The fabric had all broken apart. I put new fabric on. Everything looks good. I made a few other minor repairs here and there. The finish looks fine. This is the original finish. The value of this piece is the fact that the owner's father used it, so it still looks like his little desk. I think it looks pretty good. 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