About Us
Here at The Restored Furniture Place, we are a family run business with the aim of providing you with better quality furniture for less money. Read more about us, what we do, and why buying restored furniture is a great choice for you, and the environment.
Our Story
We are a family run, restored furniture business with over 40 years of experience in the heart of Cumbria, England. Our aim is to provide you with the better-quality furniture – that’s difficult to find these days.
In the past most furniture had to be made by hand with better quality Oak etc. Furniture today however, is mostly designed for what a machine can make with lower quality materials only cutting corners while the prices to you slowly increase. This is why we restore furniture from the past to give you better quality for your money.
We believe professional restoring is better used on higher quality furniture because it takes just as long to restore something of a higher quality as it does to do a piece low quality. In addition, higher quality pieces are generally made of solid wood which means the standard they can be restored to is much higher and even to the point of being nicer than when they were manufactured new!
A lot of work goes into scouring the country to find the right items that are restorable, at the right price which justifies the work and then organising getting that item to us. This is all worth while due to 4 key advantages to buying restored furniture which you can read below.
Why Buy Restored Furniture?
Better Quality
When you buy restored furniture, it allows you access to without doubt far better-quality furniture for your money. This is because it costs too much to manufacture good quality furniture these days and the skills to do so have diminished. Almost all the high-quality brands and manufactures have gone simply because of rising costs meaning restored furniture is the only way to get the upper end of quality in modern times.
Eco-Friendly
Buying Restored is the most eco-friendly way of buying furniture possible. Manufacturing new furniture has so many energy consuming processes such as chopping the trees down, transporting them to the factory, using huge machinery to create the products and then transporting said products across the globe often from China and Vietnam! With restored furniture however, all those heavy energy consuming processes have been done originally and you’re giving a new lease of life to an older piece which means one less new piece of furniture needs to be made.
Faster Delivery
New furniture generally has to be ordered in and this can take months to even get a delivery date. With restored furniture, your item is psychically here, what you see is what you get! It’s all ready to go and can even be in your home same day by visiting the shop and taking it away. With our delivery you’re only waiting for us to plan an efficient route and we’re proud to say we aim as best we can to do this within as fast as up to 3 weeks!
Larger Choice
When restoring furniture every piece is different, this means you aren’t limited to just certain matching ranges the new shops try and sell you. Every item is unique and you can often much more easily find a specific size, colour or even practical use. Everything being unique also means when an item goes another freshly restored item takes its place creating an ever-changing shop of interesting pieces to discover!
The Restoration Process
Here at The Restored Furniture Place, we have our own unique way of restoring our furniture. We professionally restore all our items on site, by hand, spending even multiple days sometimes on a single project. Most commonly in recent years people paint their furniture to restore it. This is ideal for some people as it easily covers up any blemishes they could not remove and is easier to do compared to polishing. Furthermore, furniture people paint over is generally not very good quality and the paint helps to hide that fact. We however, only choose to restore the upper end in quality which is too good to paint.
Generally, most of the furniture we acquire is in a mess and heavily damaged due to wear and tear or neglect. Equally we get some pieces that have a darker finish on them. These darker pieces aren’t sought after as much these days, so we strip them down to modernise them, making them more desirable.
The first task is to assess what needs restored on the item. This can range from general wear and tear in the finish to scaws or chips in the wood, swelling and bent panels, broken joints to missing pieces to cup rings and other water related damage. After assessing what needs to be done, it usually always involves removing at least some or all of the old finish to progress with sorting the deeper issues.
Often the skill is being able to remove just the parts of finish needed and then being able to match the colour back. This is especially useful on larger projects as they use up a lot of time and resources if you do the whole piece. We estimate about 30% of our projects we complete without having the remove all the finish. Having this ability helps us keep up with the flow of sales and stock levels high enough.
After the finish has been removed and any deeper issues are fixed, it is important to make sure the wood has been properly prepared so that when we wax or polish the piece, the wood draws the finishes in evenly and correctly. We usually always finish our furniture at the end using Briwax unless it requires a polish to match any colours. Briwax is ideal to use as it gives a lovely natural shine to the wood and is easily maintained by you at home to keep your furniture looking as good as the day you bought it.
