One bench, no batching
Refinishing is not production spraying: one piece is on the bench at a time, and it stays with the same pair of hands from the first stripper wash to the final rub-out. Nothing waits in a queue of half-stripped chairs; nothing is colour-matched by guess under booth light and judged later at your window. The piece is photographed at intake, and the photographs travel with the quote.
Services
What the bench takes
Tables, chairs, chests, doors and whole kitchen runs — priced by the piece off the card below, with colour matching and small repairs inside the rate rather than bolted on after.
The piece card
Dining chair, stripped & re-finished$95
Loose joints reglued; colour matched; lacquer or oil to suit
Dining table, per top$440
Water rings and burns out; grain raised; hard-wearing finish
Chest of drawers$520
Stripped, colour evened, runners waxed, knobs refitted
Bedroom suite, per piecefrom $310
Headboard, tallboy, bedside — matched as one set again
Kitchen door, sprayed both faces$27
Off, degreased, sanded to 320, catalysed enamel, hung
Whole kitchen run, on site$1,790
Tented in your kitchen; three days start to vacuum
Veneer repair, per damaged area$85
Matched veneer let in, grain lined up, colour blended
Colour match to a surviving surfaceincluded
Spectro-read and proofed on the piece itself
The wall
Pieces, before they left the bench
The method
How a piece goes through the room
Intake & quote
Photographed, joints checked, finish identified under solvent tests, and quoted by the piece against the card. Collections run Tuesdays and Fridays; the piece travels blanketed on pads.
Strip & stabilize
Chemical strip for the old varnish, never brute sanding through a veneer; loose joints reglued and clamped overnight; veneer losses let in with matched stock running the same direction as the grain.
Colour & build
Colour built in layers — water stain, grain filler where the wood wants it, shellac barriers between — then four thin topcoats of lacquer or three of hardwax oil, chosen by the life the piece actually leads.
Rub out & return
The last coat cut back with 0000 wool and paste wax where a hand-rubbed look is right, or left high-gloss where it is not. Delivered on pads, placed where it lives, and the care card left beside it.
How a piece travels
Blankets, corner pads, and a van whose racking was built for furniture rather than fetched for it. Collections and deliveries run Tuesdays and Fridays across Ashcombe and the vale, the piece is photographed on the tail-lift at both ends, and the intake photograph is the reference the finisher works to — so the debate about how it used to look is settled by evidence, on day one, in writing.
The table had a decade of white rings and a burn from a fondue set we do not discuss. It came back looking like the day my parents bought it — better, honestly — and the finisher rang twice: once about a repair he had found under the varnish, once to ask which Sunday we wanted it delivered. On pads, to the inch.
Two restoration firms quoted us new doors before they finished looking at the old ones. The Varnish Room stripped the orange varnish, matched the colour the wood actually is, and hung them back on soft-close hinges. The kitchen stopped being a project.
My grandmother’s chest arrived with somebody’s 1970s varnish and a wobbly leg. It went away for a fortnight and came back steady, the right colour, and with the original brass knobs polished rather than replaced. My mother cried. So did I, a bit.
The intake photographs settled an argument my husband and I had been having for eleven years about what colour the elm dresser used to be. We were both wrong. The dresser is magnificent.
The care-card promise
Every piece leaves with a card naming its finish and the two products that will keep it right — and nothing that will void it. If a finish we applied fails inside five years of ordinary life, the re-do is ours, collection included. Furniture should outlast the fashion that mistreated it, and our work is the second chance it gets.
Asked at intake, answered here first.
Strip it or sand it — which do you do?
Chemical strip, near always: sanding through old varnish is how veneers get sanded through, and this bench has never once repaired the damage a sander did. Sanding comes after, by hand, to prepare the surface — never to remove a finish.
Can you match what the wood used to look like?
Yes, from the piece itself: under a chair rail or inside a drawer there is usually an unfaded patch of the original, and the colour is built to that evidence rather than to memory. The intake photograph records it before a solvent touches anything.
Lacquer, oil or wax — how do I choose?
By the life the piece leads: hardwax oil for tables that take hot plates and damp glasses, catalysed lacquer for kitchen doors and anything wiped daily, and a hand-rubbed waxed finish for pieces whose beauty is being touched. We advise, you decide, and the care card records which and why.
Is collection really included in the price?
Across Ashcombe and the vale, Tuesdays and Fridays, on our own racking — blankets and pads, photographed at both ends. Further out we quote the miles honestly and once; the piece card’s numbers never move.
How long is a piece away?
A chair or a chest is a fortnight; a table top or a bedroom suite is three weeks; a kitchen run is three days and happens in your kitchen, tented, while you live around it. The quote states the week the piece returns, and the van is booked before the quote is signed.
Name the piece. We name the week.
A photo by email gets a card price before anything is collected; the bench confirms it at intake. Collections run Tuesdays and Fridays. bench@varnishroom.example